Mother Mary, our garden selves, and other things you should know.

Meet the writer behind Cadence & Canticle

Hi—I’m Lahni Blair. I am a Kentucky native residing in a 100+ year old white Victorian cottage with my high-school sweetheart husband and two literary-named children. The walls of our home are my canvas and I love filling them with thrifted treasures that reflect that which is good, true, and beautiful—floral prints, antique frames, brass sconces, contemplative art, etc. If these walls could talk, they would tell the story of an imperfect woman, saved by grace through faith, who sometimes exchanges sharp words with her husband and has hid from her children behind a locked laundry room door. They would proclaim the undeserved grace that has shaped her heart and home—the great mystery that frames her days.

My faith background is Protestantism, but I am increasingly outgrowing that Luther shaped box these days and have many thoughts about the effects of the Protestant reformation on the life—and wounding—of the Church. I hope not to scare you away, so I’ll save those thoughts for another day…

If you came to my house, you’d be greeted by a gallery wall, featuring a beautiful vintage painting of Mary—the mother of Jesus. I must admit, I felt like I was breaking some sort of Protestant law when Mother Mary found her home upon my wall (for a branch of Christendom that sought to break free from onerous rules and regulations, there are quite a lot of things that you “shouldn’t” do and hanging the mother of Jesus upon your wall is certainly one of those unspoken (and sometimes loudly spoken) “no,no’s”—especially in the low-church¹ varieties of evangelical Protestantism.

Nevertheless and glory to God, she fits right in.

Hanging her on our wall was quite symbolic of the faith journey I’ve been on for the past several years. Making space in our home for this holy saint was an act of resistance against the powers of division in the life of the Church—the very life whose incarnation found its home and sustenance in the womb and flesh of this Jewish woman from Nazareth.

I am passionate about ecumenical unity and curious about the transformational power of the gospel at the intersection of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. There is room for so much more than many of us have been led to believe (and to be clear, this doesn’t mean that I believe all roads lead to God, but it does mean that I am certain that there is one man who is on one path and he is searching for us all). And while I don’t quite fit neatly into any one of these major branches of the Church, I am learning that it is okay for my soul to make space and take up space in a little bit of each of these sacred traditions. It is the light of Christ that unites us and carries us home—we have much to learn from one another along the way.

I believe that words written and words read have the ability to shape our souls in mysterious ways. Writing allows me to articulate the language of my soul, a language that I don’t otherwise have access to. As for words read, I usually keep about 5 or 6 books going at a time and most of them are non-fiction—books on theology, spiritual formation, and memoirs fill my little built in book shelf that waits for me right next to my thrifted floral chair in the corner of our bedroom.

The right words and books give us the courage to unleash a holy imagination that grants us the gift of catching glimpses of and growing into our garden selves—the inner self that is “being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16) as we journey home towards a better Eden where truth, goodness, and beauty hold hands and lead the way. And we, even here, are invited to join their eternal dance, allowing ourselves to be formed by this triune mystery—a mystery held together by the triune One himself. Hans Urs Von Balthasar in his multi-volume work The Glory of the Lord: a theological aesthetic says this in Volume 1: Seeing the Form:

“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order to easily dispose of it. Our situation today demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”

The more we open ourselves to this mystery and teach our souls to feast upon truth, beauty, and goodness (in all its forms—scripture, music, art, literature, writing, dancing, baking, making, and all the sacred manifestations of life and living), the more we understand the divine light of Christ that has left no thing untouched. The mystery is not found in the forms of any of these things themselves, but rather in the peculiar reality that these things point to the unseen work of the divine light that is being formed mysteriously in ourselves.

Lastly—

I am in process and this jolting road back to Eden constantly reminds me of Paul’s words in his letter to the Romans— “who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24, emphasis mine). On my son’s fifth birthday last year, after enduring a royal birthday tantrum on our evening out to celebrate, we returned home to decompress. We made the trek up the stairs to his bedroom and I snuggled him in close as we found our way to his comfy oversized chair. I proceeded to talk to him, with hot tears streaming down his little face and heavy tears forming in mine, about making the choice to listen to mommy and daddy even when it’s really hard. He looked at me sincerely—placing both hands upon his head completely perplexed—and said, “Sometimes my brain is crazy and I want to listen but it doesn’t do what I hope for it to”.

This is the struggle of our earthly lives, dear readers—our minds and bodies wage a war against our deepest hopes. My little theologian reminded me of Paul’s words in Roman’s 7:15–“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. As my life is steadily rolling on towards the end of another decade, I am learning that returning to the garden is a process. This is not something that is to be merely acknowledged in my head—it is something that must be worked out in my heart. There is a great chasm between acknowledging that we are in process and actually surrendering to that process. This is the work of a lifetime—the work of this day and the next, beginning over and over again, until we stumble into glory land and meet the garden maker who has been shaping us into our garden selves all along.

“Who will deliver me from this body of death?….

…Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24-25, emphasis mine)

Tell me about yourself in the comments below! How are truth, beauty, and goodness shaping your life right now—I’d love to know!

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Thanks for reading Cadence & Canticle— I’m so glad you stopped by. May you leave this space blessed and heartened as you return to the soil and stewardship of your life. I’d love for you to join this community of fellow pilgrim-souls!

1. Low-church as opposed to High-church—these being made as post-reformation distinctions to differentiate between denominations who put “high” emphasis on the liturgy, ritual, vestments, sacraments, etc. (Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, etc.) versus those denominations (Baptist, Pentecostal, non-denominational, Holiness traditions, etc.) that have a “low” or non-existent practice of those things categorized as being High-church.