Week 45 (2025)
common meals & cremation, divorce memoirs & suffering
Enjoy this collection of digitally scrapbooked resonances… this attempt to weave unexpected connections… this Imaginary, Weekly Magazine I’d Like To (Or Need To) Read gleaned from other magazines, journals, writers, creators of good things. Perhaps it is many things. I can’t guarantee a niche (my life story, amiright) but I can guarantee the equivalent of a satisfying charcuterie board. Comments are imagined to be around a conversation table. Cheers.
to read: books
Grow Where You're Planted: Reclaiming Eden In Your Own Backyard — Samantha N Stephenson — I do owe her a true endorsement. But besides the fact that Modern Suburban Girl Me learned enough about chickens to allow me to say in a new friends’ backyard, “Oh, they’re almost ready to lay eggs? About six months old then?” like I didn’t just learn that this week…. this was a welcome read.
I must say, I am a bit of stoic when reading. It’s hard to identify with those who cry their way through the ends of novels. (Yes, I’m not sure what my deal is. Never have. Just can’t do it.) But of course, there are very uniquely timed things which the Spirit puts in our path. It’s difficult to talk about this kind of thing without devolving into either the dribble of platitudes or some massive personal oversharing… but one portion that had me in tears this past difficult week—among a more broadly difficult period in life—were the explanations (and necessity) of both dormancy and pruning.
Somehow I was at this exact point in the book when A Good Wilderness shared Apple Orchards and Necessary Dormancy, after giving me some of her own advice. I suppose we often receive what we need in strange ways, sometimes being things people quite literally place in front of us to read.
Lilacs in the Sun - Claude Monet
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
When Death Calls at Night — Victor M. Sweeney, First Things — “We Christians traditionally bury our dead intact out of respect for the body and in imitation of Christ’s three days in the tomb. Cremation, while seemingly new, is a repackaged form of the ancient immolation of the dead by our pagan forebears. And, oddly enough, many of these long-dead pagans went to their final dispositions accompanied by a coin: a single obol in their mouth or two denarii placed upon each eye.”
related and previously shared: Why We Need Graveyards and Ross Byrd’s Against Cremation—part of the great 2025 The Formative Power Of How We Approach The Body Starter Pack nobody really planned or asked for, and which I just coined—also including pieces against In Vitro Fertilization and Vasectomies. Get ‘em while they’re…... hot? evergreen? But alas, it’s the girl with two body compilations talking.
Sunday Supper — Ersun Augustinus Kayra, Plough — “A recurring meal is a quiet antidote that weakens the feeling that we must face our lives alone.”
Why Are Divorce Memoirs Trending? — Kerri Christopher, First Things — “Berry names a fatal flaw in modern marriage, but it is tied to another: the view of children as merely incidental add-ons, to be gotten (or disposed of early on) at the whim of the spouses. The problematic nature of this approach is myriad; but one practical issue is its false idea that bringing a child into a family involves the equivalent of simply adding in one more set of tasks to be negotiated.”
On the topic of marriage generally, been slowly going through this companion guide to the Deep Rooted Marriage.
How Do You Choose to Say Yes to Suffering... Again? — Meghan Safstrom Fisher, Planting Sycamore Trees — “My prayer now is that for the rest of my life, whether I’m in the abundant land of goodness or in the valley of death, that my ability to see & trust God’s love in both of those places becomes easier & simpler to do.”
The language she uses regarding suffering is valuable and worth sitting with as Christians. It inevitably comes into the pregnancy conversation for women—whether it’s mental, social, physical, or something else tragic, debilitating, heavy. At the very least, doing so could change our posture in how we talk about the degree and kind of suffering in our own story. I’m grateful she shared hers. (Additionally, she has thoughts on bidets because we all contain multitudes.)
related and previously shared: Dixie Dillon Lane on finding a cure for HG.
more on sexual and procreative ethics—in medicine, society, and our own lives:
![the [female] body: a compilation](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wWgM!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4915e0a2-6b60-42c4-93c8-748af2fa1f4c_480x360.jpeg)
![the [desecrated] body: a compilation](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dRya!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c9d3ae9-c6b3-42ba-a5db-f5b7f91da982_555x600.jpeg)
to watch, listen to
Continuing On:
Mere Fidelity — Should I Stay or Should I Go (from my denomination)? — If you remember this interview with Brad East which has showed up here before, you will appreciate this chat. // and “In honor of Matt Anderson: Sacramental Pixie Dust.” (I remember this phrase. Andrew’s book was great.)
Woven Well Podcast with Caitlin Estes — Episodes 117 — Client Story: Ashely (Overcoming PMDD). See also her older post Wading in the Deep Darkness, which I appreciated as deeply as this interview.
“Could it really have been this simple?”
One could go into a rant about how women’s mental health issues are treated the exact same as men straight out of the gate, without taking physiological, hormonal factors into consideration first.
The power of being seen, understood, and helped toward healing is invaluable. This also ties into the suffering thread from Meghan’s essay above. It’s yet another kind of suffering that might be our lot, but God is with us and for us as we navigate it, seeking whatever help we might need.
(more resources here)
The chicken anecdote made me chuckle. I always feel a little cheeky when I get to use recently acquired book knowledge haha.
Love the theme of endurance running through these pieces this week. The sharing of these things is part of how we all endure and that is a beautiful thing.
I planted 2 apple trees in our small backyard this fall! They are now dormant under a bit of early snow (we live in central Indiana), and I'm hoping that they can repeat a part of my childhood for our boys.
Listening to the Mere Fidelity podcast today and interested to hear what it says. I've written a bit about my husband's and my denominational journey, both born/raised LCMS (though some of our parents took a more convoluted journey), went into ACNA for a few years for several reasons, and are coming back to the LCMS for other reasons.