Summer Kinard's Blog, page 18
November 5, 2015
October 30, 2015
You’re Invited to Tea
Tea & Crumples makes its debut on Monday! I’m taking deep breaths into a paper bag and spending time with friends this weekend. Birthing a book into the world brings along some of the same emotions as birthing children: punchy protectiveness, ecstatic goodwill, hollowing insecurity, and of course, joy. I’d love to see my local readers at the big launch next Saturday, November 7, at the Main Branch Durham County Library. When? At teatime, of course! 3pm.
Join us for tea if you’re in town!
October 22, 2015
The Weather is Perfect for Tea & Crumples
Fill your life with Faith, Tea, and Love.
Order Tea & Crumples today!
Release date: November 2, 2015
Early Praise for Tea & Crumples:
“A Delicious Read.” -Cathy Smallwood, Tea Master
“This book is full of goodness.” -Deborah Hining, Award-Winning Author of A Sinner in Paradise
“The intuition, love and prayer she put into each pot and person was amazing.” -Linda Rainey, Christian fiction reviewer
“Uplifting, joyful, helpful healing.” -Robin B., Christian fiction reviewer
“Not only was I immersed in the novel, I was living it.” -Marianne B., Christian fiction reviewer
Praise from Summer’s Fictional Fans:
“Better than Fordyce’s Sermons.” -Lady Catherine De Bourgh
“This is the book I was reading when Darcy got all flirty at Netherfield. Just saying.” -Elizabeth Bennet
“I’ve added it to the library at Pemberley.” -Mr. Darcy of Pemberley in Derbyshire
“I have spent many an evening recording wise extracts from this worthy volume.” – Mary Bennet of Longbourn
“There are few books I can tolerate with equanimity, but Tea & Crumples is one of them.” -Mr. Bennet of Longbourn
Pin it and don’t forget it! Lizzie Bennet reminds us to order a copy of Tea & Crumples.
*Amazon link is an affiliate link. If you use it to shop, Amazon will give me a small percentage of the sale, at no additional cost to you.
October 14, 2015
Praying for the Family is Not Enough in Miscarriage
I can tell the religious background of someone offering condolences straight away.
Protestants: My prayers are with their family and loved ones.
Humanists: My thoughts are with you in this difficult time.
Catholics: God grant them rest, and may light perpetual shine upon them. Or My prayers are with them and their families.
Orthodox: Memory eternal! I’m praying for them and the consolation of their family.
Do you see the difference? Protestants and Humanists pray for survivors, but the older traditions pray also for the dead. I used to think the difference didn’t matter. Any and all good thoughts or prayers are welcome in a time of crisis. But when I lost a baby through miscarriage, it was only the prayers that included the baby that comforted me. They were the only prayers that made me feel that the baby was really present with God. They were the only prayers that drew the baby into the whole story of salvation.
A photo from the home funeral of our miscarried baby.
Praying for the dead is a Christian habit as old as the tombs where they met in the early years. We can trace prayer for the dead to Mary praying for the life of her dead brother Lazarus. The Church believed so thoroughly that even in Sheol, God is there, that when John the Baptist died, they saw it as him going before Jesus yet again, making a way for his conquering death by preaching to those who had died. Christians who maintained fewer breaks with tradition kept the idea that the dead are recipients of God’s grace, persons held in God’s love as they await fulfillment in the resurrection. The elaborate infrastructure of grief that dominated Europe before the Reformation is gone, but the prayers are not.
Praying for the dead matters, and it matters especially when a baby dies. When a baby is lost, affirming that he or she was here, that she or he was human is the best solace to the family left behind. When a child is lost through miscarriage or early stillbirth, medical customs often deprive the family of a chance to bury or hold the little one. To the grief of losing the child is usually added the lack of physical closure. Families and communities do not often get to say goodbye. Praying for the dead child is the best, and sometimes the only, way to affirm the child’s full humanity. When we pray for someone, we acknowledge their full humanity by offering them the full mercy and love of God who made them and draws them near.
What’s needed is prayers for the dead, even those youngest dead lost through miscarriages. What’s not needed are the substitutes our culture has invented to patch the hole left in faith when traditional Christian grief culture is removed:
The child is not an angel. Angels are disembodied. Children are humans. Dead children are humans whose bodies failed sooner than usual, but they are still sacred, those bodies. They are still redeemed by God who became human, who in Mary’s womb was once as small as the smallest ones who bear God’s image.
The child was not taken to prove a point. It’s not kind to suggest that God is testing how much a family can handle. We all will die, and we all hope in the Resurrection. But to suggest that God’s healing power must be set up by a prior cruel deprivation, is to misunderstand the freedom of God and the fullness of God’s grace.
Having another child does not make up for losing the one who died so young. It’s not helpful to suggest that a parent chin up in the hope of having another child. The child was not an accessory from an assembly line, but a wondrous creature who was loved and brought into being in love. The lost child doesn’t forfeit humanity or uniqueness when he or she proves our mortality too soon.
Praying for children lost in miscarriage gets to the heart that these false steps aim at: the child is cherished, and loved, and matters. We are all strengthened when we acknowledge God’s grace even in the womb, because God became human that we –even the smallest– might become like God.
October is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. If you or a loved one has lost a baby to miscarriage or early death, this month will likely bring extra sadness and consolation. The cultural calling forth of memories is an ideal time to begin to pray for the smallest dead. If your faith community does not have prayers for the dead, keep the baby in mind while reading Bible passages set aside for funerals. Read aloud Psalm 139 while thinking of the child. Or say {this Orthodox Prayer}.
Summer Kinard is a Greek Orthodox Christian writer with a Th.M. in early church history and theology. Her next book, Tea & Crumples*, shows a woman who lost her baby at 19 weeks gestation navigating grief when all that’s left is faith, tea, and love. In the course of the story, Tea & Crumples offers several examples of the way forward through pregnancy loss. Tea & Crumples is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
*Affiliate link. If you shop through an affiliate link on my site, I receive a small percentage for referral,though the price does not change for you.
October 9, 2015
The Body of the Book
This week on Tea & Crumples blog, I talked about the process of writing Tea & Crumples, including the unexpected time that life imitated art.
Originally posted on Tea and Crumples:
When you drink tea, you come to know the lingo. Teas are usually rated on body, astringency, fragrance, and liquor. I find myself thinking of books the same way, both in reading and writing. Tea & Crumples has daily graces as its body. It’s full-bodied with grace, but not very astringent, like the best-loved tea of the main character Sienna.
This is one of my favorite quotes about the intersection of the sacred and daily living with tea.
I thought of the idea for Tea & Crumples the tea shop and stationery store in college. I went to university in a small town with a vibrant main square around the courthouse. The buildings were elegantly proportioned brick with plate windows and balconies running along the walls inside. There was a building there that put me in mind of the perfect place to meld my love of tea and my love…
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October 2, 2015
The Problem with Peeple
Or, the most passive aggressive and cowardly social media app ever.
Writing Like a Mother author Summer Kinard thinks the new app is going too far.
My friends and I have this little hashtag for moments like this: #nope. Rating PEOPLE? Really? Who is going to use this for good?
Here are some of the most common Peeple comments, as imagined by Anyone Who Watches Social Media Trends Ever:
She’s definitely a bad mom. I saw her look at her phone while her kids were sliding, and one of the kids had chocolate frosting on his face because SHE GAVE HIM A CUPCAKE FOR SNACK. OMG Neanderthal.
Saw him in the store buying oatmeal. Plain oatmeal. Who eats this anymore when there are so many cereal options?
Didn’t text me back.
For anyone who knows him, you already know what I’m going to say. Let’s just leave it at that. (2nd lowest ranking)
Has an old TV that won’t even hook up to a PS4, not that he knows what that is.
u no wut i mean rit? dis ho not give wut advertiz {expletive deleted}
Worst grocery bagger ever.
This teacher is so stoopud. She giv me homwerk like i need it n stuff. {expletive deleted}
Now, there was just this very encouraging viral post from NYMag about the benefits of reminding someone of their best moments {click here for article}. Could Peeple be used for good in this way? Sure. Some nice folks will Girl Scout up the place with positivity and joy, but on the whole? I’m thinking this is just a new temptation to pettiness and passive aggressive ranting.
There is one way I can imagine this will be used well: micro fiction. I think there are enough awesome persons out there to turn Peeple into a hilarious new medium for micro-fiction on famous people. I’m thinking along the lines of the Chuck Norris fan memes or the reuse of Mean Girls lines to praise people in a clever way. Or the Amazon comments for {this Three Wolf tee shirt}*. Let’s aim for that.
*affiliate link
September 18, 2015
How bursting into song saves the world
He wasn’t very large when I sang him his first aria. My younger newborn twin, our baby B, was in the NCCU with a then-mysterious ailment. He wiggled toward me and called out, “Ma!” when I shuffled into the room, my belly bound, my feet swollen in the aftermath of twins. I wrapped him in a silk scarf and held him over my heart.
My heart and he were friends. He had lived under my rib cage for months. He was part of the music of my body. We couldn’t feed him milk, so I gave him songs. It was one of those blurs in time when I was glad to have the big voice for which composers wrote the sad songs.
Verdi wrote his lullabies. In a nursery of beeps and soft spoken nurses with caring hands, I sang my tiny boy love songs. I hoped the music would reach through his pain and exhaustion and spin on through his heart and race through his healing wounds to mend him. My babies couldn’t touch for nearly two weeks, but that strong little boy recovered quickly. He came home.
I still sing to him as I sing to all of the children. But for baby B, the music is urgent with gratitude.
He wakes up every morning and sings his own song now. “Ever, ever, ever! Agi(os) agi agi!” His voice cracks with joy, cracks through the layers of my stony heart. I break every day, dropping words that clatter or bang. But in the mornings, before the sun, my boy and I sing. In the mornings, we remember.
August 27, 2015
Life Among the Icons
I like writing about converts. Not only am I a convert many times over, but my faith requires ongoing conversion.
That’s why I like to see the tangible ways faith takes root in daily lives. In 2000, we set up our first icons. They were color printouts of Rublev’s Trinity and the Pantocrator of St. Catherine’s Sinai. I had read about them in books by Jaroslav Pelikan in church history classes in undergrad.
In grad school at the Divinity School, we added to the collection. We set up a prayer station in our small rental houses living room, over my writing desk. The last paper I wrote for my M.Div. was on an icon of Saint Perpetua and Saint Felicity embracing. I compared the image with passages from The Martyrdom of Ss. Perpetua & Felicity and with ancient liturgical traditions. The martyrs sharing the kiss of peace just before they were killed were making a statement stronger than blood about their union with Christ in His death and resurrection. My children kiss that icon now.
Living with an iconographer is a commitment. We’ve set aside space and time and money to develop the sacred practice by my husband’s hand, written on his heart. In a family of 7, keeping an entire room for iconography is a big deal. But the rewards aren’t just in the beauty I see shining out from our iconostasis. 
It’s the delight in my daughter when she arranges flowers for a feast day.
It’s the peace and wisdom that the contemplation of holy ones sets behind my husband’s eyes. It’s the quiet teaching of children that we are all green underneath in icons.
But best of all, the icons remind me that I walk among icons every moment. The children, my husband, you, me, strangers and friends, are all made in the image of God. We are all being written.
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Just two months till the release of Tea & Crumples! Preorder now wherever books are sold. Releases November 2!
If you’re a blogger or reviewer, click the book cover above to read Tea & Crumples on NetGalley.
August 7, 2015
Why There Are No Mothers
I read the articles lamenting the lack of mothers in kid literature and princess films and kid stories generally. I rolled my eyes every time a mother was absent in the stories I read or saw with my children. But today, the last day of Princess Camp with my oldest daughter, I understood.
We watch and talk about a princess movie with elevensies
The mothers are telling the stories. I tell the stories. My mom and grandma and aunts told me the stories. They aren’t anti-mama. They’re armor against our darkest what ifs. If I can’t be there for my joys, my loves, my children, I want them to survive. I want them to thrive.
The orphan stories that shape our childhoods are the mothers’ attempts to place a catch net under the fall of grief. If I am taken from you, dear ones, I want you to bounce. I want you to know you can keep going. You can work your way to glory, even with a hateful stepmother who does no more than feed you. Your beauty is the beauty in my eye, and it will not fade when my eyes close.
Your calling will still wait for you. My love will still go with you. Even if you’re so lonely and sad that you talk to mice. I know you’re good. I know your goodness. If you can’t stand on my shoulders to reach the high fruits, at least I can leave you a ladder.
Climb the stories of resilience and perseverance and hard work. Don’t believe any liars that come around (Voldemort), even if they hold open an elevator to the top. Avoid the soul eaters of greed and bitterness. If I were there, I would stand by you like I did when you were little. Hands on hips, pudgy fingers pointing, we’d shout, “No, no, bad guys! You may NOT!”
I hope and pray I’ll be there for you. My eyes would shine to see you come into your glory. I hope you get to have me to kiss your beautiful heads when you’re middle aged.
But someday, I’ll only be a story you tell. I hope it’s a good one. But even more, I hope your story is good. I would be glad to be a paragraph in the introduction to your hagiography.
Their mother was devout and loved them, even if she was a bit mad. [illustration: Feminized Mad Hatter at Tea, using teacup to burn incense]
Being a child bearer is tough work. All of us who take up the call to nurture children realize how short sighted the small ones can be. Their needs are immediate and loud. Day by day they become more capable, but the sureness of death kindly evades them most of the time. That’s why we tell the stories of lean times.
Once upon a time, you will keep going, and you will shine.
July 15, 2015
Just a Reminder
Believe it.
Please share with anyone who needs to hear this today.
