Affective books

I really had good intentions of writing something reflective for Holy Week; instead I have been chewing on thoughts about what Ten Books Have Influenced Me the most. This list is going around at multiple blogs. I already whiled away more time than I care to admit looking at other people’s lists, before I decided to write my own. Limited to 10 books, I’m going to skip over some of the picture books that I loved and formed an aesthetic (thinking of Tasha Tudor books, D’Aulaires book of Greek Myths, and the English Fairy Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham), the Bible, and Jane Austen. I’d like to say Shakespeare was an influence, but I can’t think of any behavior modifications that accompanied my reading of him, except that I look for Shakespeare in the Park performances to attend in the summer. Nearly every place we’ve lived has them. Not sure about here, seeing that the heat and mosquitoes make a summer evening in a park sound like something out of the Inferno, instead of Shakespeare.



So here are a few that came to mind, roughly in chronological order of my encounter with them:

1. Anne of Green Gables – confirmed that mooning about was a worthwhile way to spend time. I didn’t have a grove of bridal blooms near my house, only a vacant lot to hide in, but it had enough trees to become a woods in which to live an imaginary life.

2 .Gone with the Wind – one of the first adult books I read. Influenced my interest in the South and Southern literature, although it certainly didn’t make any college reading lists. As a fifth grader I sat in our blue velvet Queen Anne chair and weeped when Rhett finally walked out on Scarlet. I’m almost afraid to admit how much I loved and admired Scarlet and wanted to be a strong woman just like her. I also loved that I could succeed at Trivial Pursuit because so many questions asked about the book or the movie, also a favorite.

3. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Green – a book I wanted to steal from the library. Suddenly I wanted to fall in love with somebody, anybody. I haven’t reread this book since middle school – I wonder if I should go back to it or if some spell would be broken. I can't say that the book itself really influenced the way I live, but it led to a fascination with World War II and the writers formed by it, so it influenced what I read.

4. The Closing of the American Mind – Dramatically narrowed my college search to universities with a Great Books program. John Henry Newman's Idea of a University confirmed this choice, as did The Sacred Wood by T.S. Eliot, in particular "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which changed the way I read books.

5. Brothers Karamazov – A moving answer to how to live and how not to live. My quick answer to "What is your favorite book?"

6. Confessions - Augustine’s defense of beauty as a way of knowing God eased doubts left over from adolescent rebellions/investigations

7. Love and Responsibility – why I am married and have 6 children. Assigned by a professor who opened my eyes to the beauty of the Catholic faith and to a countercultural way to raise a family. This professor went on to translate The Theology of the Body. I also borrowed his oldest son’s name for my secondborn, a name now popularized by our current Pope.

8. Wendell Berry’s work – confirmed and elevated a desire (perhaps rooted in the Little House books) to live an agrarian life. But we can’t all live in the country, so second best perhaps is the new urbanist ideal of human scaled cities, where you live close to where you work, shop, learn and worship. An ideal fed by my husband’s reading.

9. Design Your Own Classical Curriculum by Laura Berquist – opened my eyes to homeschooling, our way of life for four years, for which I still feel nostalgic. Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver and Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun, both given to me by my grandfather, also fueled an interest in alternative education, after I had spent a certain number of years feeding an adolescent disrespect for teachers.

10. There are a handful of spiritual books that have informed my theological beliefs and habits. Like many people, C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity was my introduction to theology. And it was perhaps the first book I read with an interest in learning about and amending my own life. Simone Weil’s "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View Toward the Love of God" from Waiting for God, and Kathleen Norris’ Quotidian Mysteries, both embodying a St. Teresian attentiveness to little things, (but in more appealing writing styles), and Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis, which, since I grew up the child of converts, was the first saint’s biography I ever read (no Vision saint books in my past), formed my ideas about what a Christian life looks like.  And finally, Pope John Paul II was the first and only Pope I knew of for most of my life, and his writings, perhaps especially Familiaris Consortio, were revolutionary to me.  An antidote to wanting to be a Scarlet.

Still need to work on self-discipline in the practice of making lists...

Backtracking again

I started this post a couple days ago – before my sister more eloquently described our day. I wouldn’t bother to post it, but I know at least one person in my audience will read it, and I don’t have time to rewrite it in a letter to him. Other issues around the household have absorbed my attention of late; because of their unresolved, tawdry, and emotionally exhausting nature, I don’t have much to say. All I will say is that tonight was the last chance to go to confession at our parish before the Triduum, and I showed up, after committing about 100 sins getting all the kids in the car, at the wrong time. In the next two days before we are going out of town for an Easter celebration and spring break trip to Texas, I might try to hunt down a church with sacraments for last minute penitents, but I’m also hoping that God will accept some of these trials as sufficient penance.



***

Thanks to our most loving mother, my sister and I were able to take a day trip to New Orleans sans enfants. We sat in on a couple of the Tennesee Williams literary festival talks, held in the Counting House at the beautiful Historic New Orleans Collection, a room that was painted wedgewood blue with near white trim. On the wall behind the lectern was an enormous portrait of three sisters in white Scarlet O’Hara dresses. I had a hard time keeping my eyes off them.

 

from www.hnoc.org

The wall to my left was also adorned with portraits from two centuries ago: a scowling older gentleman, the lady of the house, several young people, including a young girl who must have been the house maid. One dashing young man could have been a stand-in for Mr. Willoughby, with his dark tousled hair and flirtatious smile. Were these people actually related, or had the historical society collected some portraits and arranged them to indicate familial connections?

We also had time to spend wandering the streets of the French Quarter for a couple of hours. Browsed in a couple of shops pretending we might actually buy something. Stopped in for a sandwich at one little corner bistro but were overwhelmed by the patchouli, so we passed out again through the side door. Peeked around the Ursuline Convent, now a museum, and studied its intricate model of New Orleans, its reproductions of old Bibles, and its display of actual Episcopal jewels, which suggest that a great strength of humility is needed by the man who wears them to withstand the intoxication of power. The convent church was repainted in unfortunate pastels. The empty tabernacle indicated that it isn’t currently in use; unfortunately, it wasn’t repainted to represent the period during which the convent was flourishing. I noticed in the festival program that one of the presenters scheduled later in the weekend had written two books about the Ursulines, who settled in New Orleans nearly 3 centuries ago, and who must have represented order and peace in contrast with the bacchanalian pursuits indulged in a few blocks away. The partially tended garden, peopled by contemporary statues of southern spiritual leaders, scented with orange blossoms, and sprouting a few random herbs, suggested the peacefulness of the cloister that must once have thrived here. The visit to the convent was at least as instructive as the festival.

After visiting New Orleans on three separate occasions, the feeling of having arrived in a foreign land has faded a little. I feel like I can orient myself around the French Quarter: That way to the Mississippi River, the opposite way to the city park, which we only drove through, west to the Garden District, east back home. There is still much of the city to discover; I know we’ll be making a trip to do the Audubon zoo and insectarium at some point, and I’m daydreaming about a weekend trip with my husband after his return: we’ll check into one of the quaint little European style hotels a couple blocks up and over away from the shopping and bars. Then we’ll stroll at a romantic pace along the city streets for awhile before dining at one of the little bistros. The next day we’ll visit some churches and look for the oldest tombs at some cemeteries, before spending the rest of the afternoon at the art museum and picnicking in the city park. Maybe whoever is watching the kids could meet us there, so that we all could enjoy the little storybook theme park there.

I’m happy my mom and sister felt the instant enchantment of New Orleans on their first visit. You always want the people you love to love what you love. Like this picture.

Youth Serum

There is nothing for shaving 20 years off your age like sharing a bed with your sister. I finally had someone to put my ice cold feet on. Last night my visiting sister and I lay in my bed and whispered and giggled like we used to when we were afraid our mother would rap on the wall and tell us to quiet down. And maybe in the back of my mind, the little girl me was half afraid her half-awake mother, hair tousled into horns by sleep, was going to appear at the doorway and demand what in the world we were thinking. But we kept talking anyway until we became incoherent.



My sister and I look like two different sides of the family. If we were going to the Oscars, I would wear one of those simple, sleek column gowns like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d wear something with a little décolleté and feminine curves like Kate Winslet. But we often think alike: while flipping through one of her fashion magazines while we were talking with my mom, who came along to visit too, I paused at an ad that showed two bronzed beauties in expensive clothes at the beach with their arms draped over each other, one looking directly at the camera, the other staring off into the horizon. “Look, it’s you and me!” I said.



She laughed. Apparently on the drive down here, my mom was looking at the same magazine and held up that ad with a disgusted, “Look at this.” And my sister said, “It looks like me and Emily.” Of course, the magazine is trying to suggest the eroticism that my mom picked up on, not sisterly love, although the two models do look alike. And if my sister and I hung around the beach like that, I’m sure we would get some stares because we don’t look alike. But we have often lamented that the sisters in Jane Austen’s day were allowed to be much more affectionate without suspicion.



Not that suspicion has deterred my sister from harassing me with irritating shoulder squeezes. She does not mind attracting attention. But then she has always been the beauty and I the brains in our sisterly partnership. (Not that she’s not brilliant, too, of course.) As teenagers, she read fashion magazines, and I read our grandfather’s scholarly magazines. Two nights ago we stayed up late detailing some of our differences: she’s afraid of getting old and ugly; I’m afraid of getting old and senile. And our mother, who is the most youthful mother of 30somethings I know, assured us we were both wonderful. But, motherly affirmations aside, we shared our struggles with coming to terms with being nearly middle-aged and having such a long way to go in our spiritual lives, although we are happy to point out each other’s root sins.



This visit is going to be a short one. We are off to New Orleans today, with two carloads of children in tow, so we are going to eat beignets and window shop in the French Quarter, peek into churches and then play at the park. Meanwhile, my sister and I are plotting our return to the fabled city on Thursday, if we can figure out the logistics of leaving our mother with the 11 cousins, so that we can sit in on the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and learn the failproof method of writing a novel in six months.  If we had planned ahead at all, she should have used one of her free vouchers to fly down here just for that.

Dreams

I had a nightmare the other night, just before waking, one of those haunting dreams that lingers in recesses of consciousness. In the dream the kids and I were trying to get somewhere on foot, and we had to cross a highway. At first the only means appeared to be running across multiple lanes of speeding traffic, but then some plump older lady in flowing clothes pointed out that there was a pedestrian walkway a little further on. So we trudged over only to find that the pedestrian bridge had no railings. And it was about a 1000 miles up in the air over a cliff. But we started across, me holding the toddler, watching the other kids in front of me. I knew as I watched my five year old that he might fall off, but I had to hold the baby. And sure enough: As the five year old looks toward one side of the walkway, he walks in a diagonal right off the other side of the bridge. I watch him in slow motion go over the edge, flailing and crying, but I am frozen and can do nothing, except think, “I knew this was going to happen.” My older son runs into action and sees that there is a river next to the highway, and it looks like the five yr old is going to fall into the river. My older son figures we can run back down the cliff to rescue him from the water. Just as I finally am able to break free from catatonia and run back to the cliffside to slide down and see if I can pull him from the river, I wake up. In that liminal state I try to relive the dream and fix it: I hold his hand. I catch him before he drifts across the bridge. I am able to swim in the river and pull him out. All kinds of solutions. but for the rest of the day, I am fearful. The dog ran in front of a car. I almost had a panic attack.




I don’t need a psychotherapist to tell me why I had this dream: like all parents, I’m afraid of one of the kids dying, especially this accident prone kindergartner, who is so unhappy at school. I’ve had similar dreams where I am unable to protect all my kids, like one where our GMC slips off the side of a river bank into the water, and I can’t figure out how to get all of the kids out of the car to swim to safety. A dream interpreter would tell me that I’m afraid of drowning under my responsibilities or something like that. I see my children running ahead of me in life, and I can’t help them all.



It’s not only in dreams that I feel powerless to protect them all from accidents and my negligence. It is a condition of motherhood to feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of protecting not only our children’s bodies but also their souls. I realize that I need to trust more in God to protect them, that my limited abilities can only do so much. These dreams suggest I think I can do it all, instead of handing my fears to God.



I also want them to learn to take care of themselves, to become less dependent on me, to stop fighting over who gets to sit next to me at dinner, who gets to crawl into my bed in the morning, who gets to sit next to me on the couch… Too often I react snappily to these petty arguments. I don’t want to sit next to any of them when they are yelling and pushing each other. Lately their pranks and aggression and teasing have worn my patience to the nub. I need their father here to straighten them out.



The Darwins posted a bit ago about how men and women like to berate their spouses when in the company of their own sex. People also like to complain about their children to anyone who will listen. How many blogs are dedicated to detailing the antics of wild children? Years ago I resolved to try not to speak badly about my husband, but lately I’ve been trying not to complain about my children (except to my husband when he calls, and my parents…). The same habit of deception is at play: I end up believing what I say. And I don’t want their last memory of me as they fall off some cliff to be of a screaming mother. Praying for patience and trust.

Inquiries

A dark car with shaded windows has been prowling the neighborhood lately - driven by a spy of sorts. A federal agent has been asking the neighbors questions about my husband. The kids were thrilled to find the agent’s business card tucked in our door when we came home from school one day. They are convinced he’s a secret agent seeking clues to some conspiracy. But there is no conspiracy: the agent is just trying to establish my husband’s security clearance.

The problem is that my husband was rarely home in the six months he lived here before he deployed. All his local friends were co-workers and are gone with him. My next door neighbor, whom I trusted enough to give a key to the house to feed the guinea pigs while we were gone over Christmas, couldn’t recall a conversation with my man. So when the secret agent questioned her about my husband’s interests and activities, she had a tough time answering. He also asked her if she’s heard any arguments. I had to chuckle about her answer: she said she hadn’t heard anything but assumed that if we’ve been married long enough to have six kids, we’ve probably had an argument or two.


The agent has had an easier time finding references in Virginia, where we had a pretty active social life. I realized cleaning up  for company today – some of the wives and kids from the regiment are coming over, and then my mom and sister are coming Monday – that I hadn’t done nearly as much hospitality cleaning here as I did in VA. Having brown tiled floors helps minimize the effort. And with the kids in school, our schedule is fuller. But the truth is, we don’t have much company. It has been harder to break into the culture down here, where there are fewer military families, and a good percentage of people grew up here and have their families around. In fact the neighbor next door grew up here, literally, in this house, with her 5 other siblings. The youngest one is our landlord, who moved a few miles away. When I tell the kids’ friends’ parents how to get to the house, they say, “Oh I know where you live! You live in the Judge’s house!” Not only do most of his six kids live in the area, but so do a passel of their cousins, one of whom has babysat for us.



Some of the other military spouses complain about this inward looking community. But having grown up in a small town, and being a Wendell Berry fan, I can’t complain. No one has been unfriendly; people just have their blood relations to keep up with. Plus when I was taking the trash out the other night, the neighbor invited me over to join her little party around the chiminea. So I got to hear stories about Hurricane Katrina and have a drink.  And if anything, after revisiting Sense and Sensibility on audio tape, I’m motivated to write more letters to keep up with my kin, which I’ve lost the habit of doing. The Dashwood sisters write lovely letters – and criticize smartly less lovely epistles, such as those of Miss Lucy Steele.



The letter campaign between my husband and me has settled into a pattern after the initial delay in delivery – I drop a note in the mail on Mondays and get one back by the end of the week. A little stack of matching envelopes is growing in the drawer of my bedside table. They’ll be a record of these six months when our lives are running in different directions. Lives can go in different directions even when sharing a household, I realize; examples of alienation between people tied by vows or genes abound in literature and life, and a part of me wonders how well I myself would be able to answer the prying questions of our federal investigative agent (although because of my bias I won't be asked).  A part of every person's soul remains unknowable. But I hope that this separation will just be another bookmark in our lives, and not a major, identity-defining event, although I do wonder how long it will take to re-establish a two –parent family routine, once this is all over. I’m just thankful we’re not looking at a 10 month or more separation.

Ancient Prayer to St. Joseph

I can’t remember right now where I first came across this prayer to St. Joseph, which, according to the Tan book, Favorite Prayers to St. Joseph, dates back to the year 50 A.D. In 1505 Emperor Charles took it into battle, and so it is especially associated with the protection of soldiers. Reading this prayer and keeping it on your person is also supposed to protect you from sudden death, drowning, and being poisoned. So in honor of my deployed Seabee, here is the Ancient Prayer to St. Joseph, to be prayed nine mornings for anything you desire.



O St. Joseph, whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of God, I place in thee all my interests and desires.


O St. Joseph, assist me by thy powerful intercession and obtain for me all spiritual blessings through thy foster Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord, so that, having engaged here below thy heavenly power, I may offer thee my thanksgiving and homage.

O St. Joseph, I never weary contemplating thee and Jesus asleep in thine arms. I dare not approach while He reposes near thy heart. Press Him in my name and kiss His fine head for me, and ask Him to return the kiss when I draw my dying breath.

St. Joseph, Patron of departing souls, pray for me.

Lenten reading

Maybe I should be embarrassed to admit how much I am enjoying Peter Kreeft’s Prayer for Beginners, which is very short and elementary, but I’ve been reading it slowly, chewing on one chapter at a time. Is my prayer life so rusty that this little book grabbed my attention? This line got me: “Reading a book about doing something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives the impression of doing what you are only thinking about doing.” Guilty. In my head I know this, and most of what Kreeft writes is familiar, but my prayer life is easily derailed by telling myself things like “I’m doing lectio divina…”


So I’ve tried to read this little book slowly as a refresher course and practice what it says, although it is not really a “how to” manual, but an gentle prod to action: “…as Brother Lawrence would say, ‘practice his presence.’ . . .To pray is to know God by practicing his presence; and this is to live in reality, instead of in fantasy worlds we construct in our own minds, in which God is absent. One moment of prayer of weak worship, confused contrition, tepid thanksgiving, or pitiful petition will bring us closer to God than all the books of theology in the world.” This little book had laid around our house in its shrink wrap for years until a couple weeks ago. In fact it almost went in the give away pile before we moved, but I thought it might be helpful to the boys in a couple years. But it was me who needed the reminders. Maybe it is a little working of the Holy Spirit that I am only open to it right now.



Perhaps I am more open to its message because I have been going to an ecumenical Bible study at the Air Force base chapel that a friend invited me to attend. We are the only two Catholics, but there haven’t been any issues of denomination, other than the fact that we have a differently vocabulary, a different theological sense to words like “church” and “anointed.”


The first day I was confident, happy to be there, ready to share what I know. But after a couple of meetings, I no longer open my mouth so eagerly. I quickly learned that these women are powerhouses of prayer. You can tell they speak directly to God, and not to impress the other women at the study. Maybe it is because they have had to beg God for their lives that their prayer is so unselfconscious. For instance, I have gradually pieced together from what has been shared that our study facilitator, a happy, peaceful blond lady in the AF Reserves, was abused by her stepfather as an adolescent, had to go through the pain of accusing him in court, left home at a young age, and lived the high life for awhile before she finally gave her life to God. Her brother is still living life day to day, in and out of jail and the hospital, in need of prayer. Another lady, who is just as cheerful as a sunny day and who has the lilting accents of a proper Southern belle, has a husband who is a manic depressive substance abuser who drinks vanilla extract when he can’t find anything else. He has taken to sleeping with a gun and has ordered night vision goggles, but diagnoses other people’s illnesses for his day job. A third, instead of the drawl of the Southern belle, uses the two syllable vowels of someone from the backwoods to talk about her mama a lot. But she also has an advanced degree and has lived all over the US and in Europe with her husband who is an AF bigwig, while nursing her sickly children.



So behind the smiles and the genuine courtesy and kindness are some scars. And although I’m not sure any of them would articulate a “theology of suffering,” they seem clearly to have offered these pains to the Lord.



The topic of the study is hearing the voice of God, based on a study by Priscilla Shirer, who is the daughter of evangelical paster Tony Evans. To me, hearing the voice of God is the gift of saints and visionaries like Mother Teresa, people given a direct call. If I were asked a month ago if I hear the voice of God, I would’ve replied negatively. Of course, I don’t hear God’s voice: that’s the province of saints, and I’m no saint. But if nothing else, this study and this little book have been the highlights of my Lent, marked otherwise by glaring failures. (loved this quote from Anne: from her pastor, Fr. Dave Cooper in Milwaukee...“Flunking Lent is still a gift from God. When you do well following your Lenten observances, that isn’t goodness on your part. It is God who gave you the strength to do it. So, when you fail to have the strength to follow through on your Lenten observances, that too, is a gift from God.” ) If nothing else, they have me trying to quiet the distractions, silencing inner critics, preparing a space for God to work.

A prayer from St. Patrick, the extended version of his breastplate prayer, which begins:  "I arise today, through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness, of the Creator of Creation.. . ." 

Time to make Irish soda bread.

Eagle Cams and Vacation plans

We spent some time watching the Norfolk Botanical Gardens' eagle cam this weekend. Watching a bald eagle feed her babies bits of fish entrails can be addicting.  And cause for meditation on mothering patiently.  And for remembering many happy visits to the Garden to see the nest in person - I love the bit of trivia that the nest is as large as a Volkswagen Beetle.   I read that there are 600 pairs of nesting eagles in Virginia, and this pair has been nesting in the same spot since 2004, which is the year we returned to nest in Virginia for the second time.  I always like to hear about monogamous birds.  I know they have a bad reputation, but I have a soft spot for pigeons because they mate for life and always return home. And my dad used to race them, a hobby that I wonder might experience a renaissance with all the interest in urban farming.

Eagles also remind me of the San Juan Islands where we honeymooned. We were kayaking around the Islands when I first saw a bald eagle in the wild.  Now my kids have seen them enough that I'm not sure they realize they once were endangered.

Which leads me to another thought. My husband wants to take a trip with me when he gets home. He suggested Ireland. I've been to England but only right around London and Oxford when my sister was living there. I thought about returning to the Pacific Northwest and staying in a yurt. Or maybe going to Greece. I'd love to visit the Holy Land like my parents' just did, but I wonder about the prudence of taking an extravagant vacation when we have kids who might like to go to college someday. Being hereditarily frugal, I've tried to strike a balance between spending money to enjoy life and saving for future, - so maybe we should just go camping in the Smokies.

Reverde

Catalog of spring in the deep south: Early magnolias in full bloom, buds on the maples and crabapples, daffodils and a few hyacinths are blooming, weeds are greening. I can’t tell what birds are back because I didn’t notice which ones left, other than white cattle egrets no longer nesting in the big cedar down by the public pier, although I have seen a few around.



I’ve been surprised at how slowly spring has been arriving here. Maybe the transition isn’t quite so glorious as it is in the north because the contrast between winter and spring is not as stark. But the pervasiveness of brown in the landscape is perhaps appropriate for Lent, brown being a more penitential color than purple.

I’ve been a little homesick for the glorious springs of my Midwestern years. Down the street from where we lived in northern Illinois there was a house that planted its entire yard in pink tulips that leapt into bloom around Eastertime. (Made me wonder if there were a breast cancer survivor living there.) My sister’s photos of a photogenic tree near my parents’ house and the completion of The Teacher’s Funeral by Richard Peck also have me thinking of Indiana. The Teacher’s Funeral is about a small town Indiana boy, Russell Culver, who wants to run away from home to go to the Dakotas to work, but his sister becomes the school teacher in the one room school after the former teacher dies, so he has to postpone his plans. The events of the year and his sister’s perseverance – and her winning the heart of his best friend – change Russell’s plans. Russell, although the main character, remained a little shadowy, not quite fleshed-out, whereas his father and his sister Tansy seemed more fullblooded, but perhaps I’m expecting too much from a YA story.

The book is heartwarming, although at times it felt like Peck was trying too hard to bring in local color – for instance, some of the dialogue about Indianapolis and a reference to the need to go to Purdue University to learn engineering in order to pull the enormous Aunt Fanny out of a ditch. I looked up to see if Peck ever lived in Indiana in order to tell if he had just done his research or if he wrote from experience and found out that he went to school at a small Indiana college where several of my family members attended. This book doesn’t have the depth of A Long Way from Chicago or A Year Down Yonder, nor of the book by his homonymous fellow author, Richard Newton Peck, A Day No Pigs Would Die, but I did appreciate the poetry by the Sweet Singer of Sycamore Township – reminiscent of the work of Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley.

Here’s a stanza from Riley’s ode to spring, “The All-Golden”:



I catch my breath, as children do
In woodland swings when life is new,
And all the blood is warm as wine
And tingles with a tang divine.
My soul soars up the atmosphere
And sings aloud where God can hear,
And all my being leans intent
To mark His smiling wonderment.
O gracious dream, and gracious time,
And gracious theme, and gracious rhyme –
When buds of Spring begin to blow
In blossoms that we used to know
And lure us back along the ways
Of time’s all-golden yesterdays!



or, more indicative of his style, “When the Green Gits Back in the Trees”



In Spring, when the green gits back in the trees,
        And the sun comes out and stays,
And yer boots pulls on with a good tight squeeze,
       And you think of yer bare-foot days;
When you ort to work and you want to not,
       And you and yer wife agrees
It’s time to spade up the garden-lot,
       When the green gits back in the trees
               Well! work is the least o’ my idees
               When the green, you know, gits back in the trees!



At one point in time I couldn’t wait to get out of Indiana – This is the best poet Indiana has to offer? I used to think, although I did like to listen to my grandmother read “Little Orphant Annie” and “The Raggedy Man.” Riley’s dialect comes to life when read outloud. But I thought his poetry seemed to glorify the backwardness of the small towns across the state. And in my adolescent arrogance, I assumed these places had lost most of the charm they had during Riley’s day. The highlights of the week were high school football and ice cream at the drive-in after little league games, no longer picnics and tire swings over swimming holes.


But now I miss those soft serve swirl cones. And the sunsets over fields of soybeans. And poking through woods on the edges of cornfields, looking for wildflowers, turtles, and hiding places. The heat rising off the pavement on long summer bicycle rides across countyline roads to get to a friend’s house, when you had to race farm dogs tearing after your tires. Riding on sleds pulled behind pick-ups down icy roads in the winter. It’s altogether too easy to fall into a reverie about the joys of childhood, much like Riley does in his poetry.

My husband gave me a collection of his poems for my birthday the year we came back to Indiana for him to get a masters degree at Purdue (construction management, not engineering). That book and the cd made by one of our babysitters with a song about Indiana borders are guaranteed to arouse nostalgia for the place I still think of as home. Perhaps because I wanted to leave so badly when I was young, I doomed myself to being a wanderer during my middle years, in exile, like I cashed in my birthright and can’t return. I worry that my children won’t have a connection to a place to consider home, no roots, although they talk often about wanting to go back to Virginia.



Then again, if I had never left, perhaps I wouldn’t appreciate what I left behind. Nor would I have had the opportunity to fall in love with the ocean (although I still think Lake Michigan can compare). Although I complain about being homesick, I do love getting to know a new place and new friends and don't wish that I hadn't ever had those experiences.  At one point when my husband and I were engaged we looked at rings with the verse from Ruth, "Whither thou goest, I will follow." (We got these instead, with our anniversary and fides, spes, caritas engraved inside. Indulge me as I just had another happy trip down memory lane looking at that web page.)  A reminder that wherever our home on earth is, we are in exile, homesick for eternity.


I’ve been doing an ecumenical Bible study and one of my sons is reading Revelations for Lent, so here are a couple more fitting quotes to close:

For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building from God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.--2 Corinthians 5:1


And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God [is] with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, [and be] their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. --- Rev 21:3-4

Watched Where the Wild Things Are last weekend. Not really a movie for kids. Afterwards everyone went to bed melancholy. It is a brown movie which we watched in a brown house during a brown season. The movie leads you to believe that Max’s wild rumpuses are caused by his need for attention after his father either died or left permanently (I missed the beginning of the movie so I didn’t catch all the backstory,if it even matters). The Wild Things are like troubled children masquerading as adults. 

Like with Max, in our temporarily fatherless household, my children have become increasingly disorderly. My ineffective discipline does little to deter their animal nature from emerging and reigning and feeding the same spirit in their siblings, either through needlings and provocations or scuffles and physical abuse of each other. The dirt clod war near the end of the movie elicited the only laughs of delight from my crowd during the whole movie, although they seemed to enjoy Max’s violent play with the wild things after they got over the initial shock of hearing the glum human voices coming out of the big destructive wild things.

Naturally.

Eventually Max realizes all this hurtful play makes the other wild things unhappy, although like siblings they quickly forgive and forget. After a minor rebellion against his kingship, he forms a connection between his mom and himself, as king, in a position of authority. They both want to make everyone happy, but they just don’t know how. In the movie his empathy for his mother sends him home, whereas in the book it seems more like he goes home because he wants to be loved for who he is, rather than whom he is pretending to be, that deep underneath the wolfsuit Max is really a good, loving boy who wants his mother to recognize him.



Perhaps the movie has captured something of the book for some readers, but the movie has a feeling of desperation absent in the book. Even though Max sits and eats cake and smiles at his mother at the end of the movie, she is still tired and lonely, and she does nothing to discipline him for running away. Even giving him chocolate cake instead of a warm supper seems to say “I’m too tired to fix you a proper supper after you’ve been so wild.” Maybe the movie left us melancholy because it hits too close to home, because it is truer to reality than to the dreaminess of the book, where the wild things are fun and controllable by Max, instead of difficult to understand in their childlike irrationality.

Missing someone to turn out the light

I’ve been suffering lately from a lack of sleep, not brought on by fear or illness or even anxiety, but by an addiction: reading junk. I was up past 3am the other night to finish off the 1000 pages of Ken Follett’s World Without End, which was the pick of my book club. And when I finally closed the back cover, I breathed no sigh of contentment, but was appalled at myself for wasting hours of sleep and a chance at having a good temper for this medieval bodice ripper with descriptions of the plague and building techniques of the 1300’s thrown in so it can pass as historical fiction. The dialogue was silly, the characters predictable, but the plot tricked you into staying involved. I can understand why it is a popular book, but I knew I was wasting time, that I needed to be asleep, that I am supposed to be sacrificing staying up late for Lent, and I should be sacrificing reading these kinds of books, but I just.  couldn’t.  put.  it.  down.

So I sat cramped in a position half sitting and standing on the edge of the bed, telling myself I was just going to skim a few pages…for 5 hours.

Instead of being so mad at myself, I should probably be thankful this is such a minor failing. I’ve had other compulsions that threatened my health. In my teens and early 20s, I wouldn’t eat a teaspoon of fat, but would binge on something like jelly beans and then go out for a two hour run. Eventually stress fractures and mono and other issues began to indicate the wear and tear on my body, but for a time I experimented with how little I could eat and still run long distance. Probably meeting my husband saved me from more than loneliness.  He gave me a reason to eat cake.


And were he home, he would’ve saved me from sleeplessness by telling me to go to bed and turn out the light. I’d grumble about his bossiness, but would comply, and would have an easier time waking up in the morning and withstanding the discombobulation of our household. Sometimes you miss the things that bother you about someone when he is gone. But sometimes those things bother you only because they reveal a tumor of selfishness in yourself that needs to be scraped away.

Indulging on memory lane

Today is a day of momentous occasion: My oldest is now thirteen. Today I am the mother of a teenager. Yikes. I’ve been looking through old photo albums and wondering how did he go from this to this?

Yesterday I sat at the park and watched my youngest laugh elatedly as she ran from swing to slide to jungle gym, and I wondered at how rarely I do this with her, just play at the park, while my oldest and I spent hours climbing and playing at various playgrounds. Of course, then we lived in an apartment with a teeny yard and now we have our own play gym in a big back yard and siblings with whom to play on it. I’m not sure that I want this stage of my life – mom of young kids hanging out at the park on sunny days – to end. The physical exhaustion of caring for babies has turned into the mental exhaustion of caring for big kids. One minute I wish they were babies again, the next I’m throwing them all out the door.

If I had had more foresight, I would've done what an aunt did for my older brother and me (my sister doesn't remember getting one) and put together a teenager box: deodorant, razor, binoculars, a book on how to talk to girls... I’m glad this kid who just went through two pant sizes in 6 months still likes to play on jungle gyms.

Here are two cuties: my oldest son and his dad, who was not a teenager.

Signs of Spring: Mississippi Wildflowers

I need to look these up since I don't recognize them, unless anyone wants to save me the work...

This one has  a sweet fragrance

I know this one is vetch, I just think it's pretty.

Part II: When kids use your camera, you find out that:

Your guinea pig is smarter than you thought

and you need to wash your windows.

and you need to wash your windows.

Church Cleaning

The other day, our school had a luncheon for volunteers, but I was not invited. Ouch. As a former volunteerist, that hurt. Sure, I have helped out in a few small ways at our new parish when seasonal help has been sought – setting up booths for the fall festival, divvying up toys for the Christmas distribution, - but I’m not in charge of anything. I’m not teaching or facilitating anything. I used to volunteer to do things like teach CCD or run marriage prep workshops or give witness talks about NFP, stuff that allowed me to show off what I’d learned.




But since I had overextended myself the last few years, I am trying to not to raise my hand for everything, but to find ways to do smaller things. My most regular ministry has been helping clean the church on Sunday evenings. As my friend who is in charge of the cleaners commented, this is not a glamorous job, but it is valuable work. Being from Colombia, she has been subject to some racial stereotyping and offered jobs by a few people who find out she cleans the church, even though she has a postgraduate degree in psychology. Cleaning someone else’s bathrooms for pay is different from cleaning the church’s toilets as an act of service, but neither is going to win you much attention.




The cleaning crew gets to go into the quiet and partially darkened sanctuary and run vacuums back and forth, back and forth, while the sanctuary lamp burns more noticeably in the dimness. With a Lysol wipe in each hand, I glide at a monk’s pace between the pews, wiping their backs, cleaning off the remains of sneezes, sticky finger marks, baby saliva. Ready for the next teether. I even sort of like cleaning the bathroom where I get to be a combat specialist in the battle with those devilish germs. Mopping takes on the rhythm of a chant, with its scrub, scrub, pull, pull movements.



I can’t say that cleaning the church has helped me to be a better housekeeper. Despite being someone who likes to help out, I don’t really like to do my own work. Cleaning God’s house is a small way of saying thanks be to God and spending a little extra time with Him. And not stepping up to do something more visible is a way of trying to be a little more humble and to see the contemplative aspect of cleaning as a ministry to those we love.

Footnotes

Sometimes in footnotes you find things like this:

From H. Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit: Eine theologishe Ästhetik, I: Schau der Gestalt, 1961:

"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 splendour around the double constellation of the true and the 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 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. … In a world without beauty—even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it—in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. … In a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency."

English translation taken from The Glory of the Lord, A Theological Aesthetics, I. Seeing the Form,Edinburgh 1982, pp. 18-19.

This is a footnote to the 2009 document by the Pontifical Council for Culture, Via Pulchritudinis, Privileged Pathway for Evangelization and Dialogue. I can't remember who recommended this, but thank you.

On Reading Pnin

I almost didn’t finish this book. My other books in progress were all more interesting than this one. But as I mentioned before, based on the raves Nabokov receives, I committed to read another novel of his besides Lolita. And I’m glad I persisted despite the lonely ending.


Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré teaching at a small university in America. The book begins with descriptions of his inept preparations to give a lecture to a ladies club, a scene which is followed by one wherein he rents a room from a colleague, and an image of Pnin as a fumbling, eccentric, slightly pathetic professor emerges. We learn that because of his peculiarities he moves about every six months. As the story goes on, we see Pnin in action, get to peek at his memories, and overhear what others are saying about him, so that our image of the man becomes more complete: ridiculed and misunderstood by many, at ease nowhere, loved by no one, but brilliant and resistant. The peek at college life is darkly humorous. Pnin’s love affair with Liza is pathetically one sided. But Pnin comes into his own during my favorite episode, when he goes for his summer vacation to the home of another displaced Russian who has married and made money and invites his fellow émigrés to his home every other year. There we see Pnin with people who understand him and enjoy his company, despite his eccentricities.



Near the end, Pnin finally finds a home he likes and hosts a successful party which Nabokov masterfully describes. At the end of the evening, at the height of his glory and happiness since coming to this college, he learns his position is about to be dissolved. His department head, Hagen, is leaving for another school, and his replacement, Pnin’s office mate, dislikes him. For a moment Hagen holds out a bit of hope: a newly arriving star for the English department is also a Russian exile and wants Pnin to teach with him. This professor is revealed as our narrator: a Russian contemporary of Pnin’s, and a poet. In their Russian lives, they had met briefly a couple times, but after escaping, they both come to Paris, where Pnin fell in love with Liza, also a poet, who is infatuated with the narrator. When Pnin learns this man is whom he would work for, he refuses, and in the last scene flees in his little car from a meeting with him: “Then the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.” So though Pnin is “shot,” the narrator seems to suggest his future is golden. Nabokov has led us to love this ridiculed little man who acts so impetuously, but so sincerely.


Next in the collection is Pale Fire, which I started, but I’m afraid it will take me even longer than Pnin, and I don’t think I can continue to renew this library book. But I do love these Library of America collections, complete, sturdily bound, with thin but strong paper. A pleasure to read.

Something different

Although Lent is supposed to be a time of simple eating, we’ve been eating well. I've baked more bread and muffins and tried new recipes: Last night it was chicken and pasta with a peanut sauce from our favorite easy cookbook, Southern Living Kids Cookbook, adapted for what we had on hand. The sauce is mostly soy sauce (1/2 c), a little sesame oil (2 or 3 tsp), and peanut butter (about ½ c) whisked together (I eyeballed the quantity because I was doubling the chicken and pasta). Then add shredded carrots and chopped peanuts. The recipe called for red pepper and green onion, neither of which I had, so I used finely chopped yellow onion and edamame. I loved it, and 4 out of 6 kids gave it a thumbs up.

The same response was merited by “Papa with Chakalaka” a recipe from the CRS rice bowl. For the papa you were supposed to make corn meal and round it into balls, but I was out of cornmeal, so I made grits to serve under the chakalaka, which is basically a sweet/spicy bean mix: You sauté onion and bell pepper in oil, add a diced chili pepper (I just used chili powder and a few pepper flakes) 2 tomatoes (I used a can of diced tomatoes), a grated carrot and a large can of baked beans, to which you add a hearty dose of curry powder and simmer for 15 minutes (or 45 like me because your son has a friend over, so you decide to make macaroni and cheese as a back up.)

My other experiment was with beef barley soup. I had some leftover chuck roast and cabbage after cooking for the priests at our parish. (Various volunteers cook for them on Saturdays. I tried to make an Irish meal, since 3 of 6 are Irish: roast, bubble and squeak, green beans, and Irish soda bread, which I could eat like cake. The Notre Dame coffee shop used to sell this dense, sweet hunk of soda bread, and I was so addicted to it that I wrote the food service and asked for the recipe. I was surprised when they sent it to me, but mine is never quite so dense as theirs because I can’t bring myself to bake with lard.) Anyway, in the soup the fat off the chuck roast soaked into the barley and the cabbage soaked in the flavor, too, so the end result was stewlike. Hearty and filling, but the cabbage and barley seemed to add a little Lenten spirit. And again, 4 out of 6 kids approved. The other 2 would be happy to exist on mac and cheese and peanut butter for the rest of their lives.

On being a claustral sister type

“I’m giving up chocolate starting tomorrow,” my 10 year old said a few days ago, plopping his last Valentine candy into his mouth. Someone had given each kid in the class a little mini heart box of chocolate. He gave me the empty box.


I have to admit that so far this Lent, I’ve been telling myself the same thing: “I’m going to bed early tomorrow.” “I’m going to have some silent time tomorrow.”


My sister asked me a couple days ago how my Lent was going. I’d like to have had a more enthusiastic reply, but a week into the season, and I’m still getting started. At Mass last Tuesday the opening prayer had the line “Through the discipline of Lent, help us grow in our desire for you”… exactly what I told my dear sister was not happening to me.


Inspired by reading In this House of Brede, I intended to use Lent as a time to be grow in a Mary spirit. My sister pointed out my tendency to scurry in another blog post. Ironically, I don’t think it was a characteristic I had in youth. In some ways, my sister and I have traded skins: In childhood, she was the socializing cheerleader, on the go, on the phone. Her side of the room was tidier than mine. I sat in a chair and read. I had a friend who would come over supposedly to play with me, but who always ended up playing Barbies with her. But sometime after I got married and had a baby, I started looking for friendship. I was living 1000 miles from my family and the friends I had grown up with, and I had no idea what to do with a baby, except read him stories and walk him to the park. Where I met friends.  My days started to fill.

My Martha self emerged even more because I married someone who was used to tidiness, so out of love for him I began to fold t-shirts in thirds, to sweep (nearly) daily, and to make an attempt at keeping yogurts on one side of the fridge, eggs and bread on the other, instead of jamming all the groceries in there together. I've never been, and am still not, a perfectionist when it comes to housework, but he's helped me appreciate how easy it is to find things when you put them where they belong.

Having multiple kids cemented the development of Martha tendencies. Out of love for them I spend more time on preparing food, applying stain remover, shuttling them around.  There just isn't much time in the day left for contemplation after keeping the kids clothed, fed, and out of the emergency room.  But somebody has to do those things, I want to cry to defend my scurrying ways, especially at family gatherings when everyone would prefer to sit and talk. As Mrs. Darwin pointed out, even the contemplatives had the claustral sisters to help with the chores. 

The other night I had a dream, a nightmare, that my landlords, a husband and wife, showed up at the door demanding to be let in. The husband said “I was here the other day and in all my 30 years of being a landlord I have never seen so many dishes left in the sink! What a mess!”


“Wait, wait!” I cried. I can explain! I ran in the house and threw all the junk into closets and under bedcovers and tried to explain why this was just an anomaly. But they still evicted us and threw all our belongings in the trash. A Martha anxiety dream if ever there was one.

This week and next, my parents are in the Holy Land. They began their pilgrimage in Cana, where they renewed their wedding vows, they renewed their baptismal vows at the river Jordan. They took part in Mass at the Manger Altar at the Church of the Nativity, and will end their trip in Jerusalem with a Lenten walking of the way of the cross.

But today they are in Bethany, where Jesus’ good friends lived, and they will visit the home of Mary Martha and Lazarus. Some Martha set this trip up for them, so that they can pray and wonder at the places where Jesus walked.

After thinking about Mary and Martha all week, I finally took another look at the passage:

 "Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her." (cf Luke 10:41-42)

In his gentle reprimand to Martha, Jesus doesn't tell her to stop working but to stop worrying and fretting. To not be upset by Mary's good example, but to imitate it.  Perhaps Jesus would have said nothing if Mary had gone about serving Him and the apostles quietly and with a smile. She probably would've heard every word He said, if she hadn't been listening to the voice inside her that was jealous of Mary and tired of trying to make everything perfect.

I shouldn't be upset by the fact that I have a to do list, but rather I should use the time I have well, to be thankful that I have so many people who need me, to not be upset if things aren't the way I would like them to be, to quiet the voices of self-doubt and criticism so that I can hear Christ, and find time to listen a little. Maybe learning to serve others is the antidote I needed for the self-absorption of my youth.  Simone Weil has an essay about learning the habit of attention when studying, so as to transform it into prayer.  The same goes for chores, as Kathleen Norris writes in "Quotidian Mysteries." And I'm sure those claustral sisters were at least trying to pray always as they did the chores for their contemplative sisters.