bearing blog

Pickiness.

One problem with being "on a diet" in America:  It tends to make you an aggravated, and possibly aggravating, dinner guest.

This is where the habit of gluttony really shows its true colors, and in so many different ways.  Our cultural expectation of overeating as part of a celebration -- and I don't mean ordinary, natural festive feasting food, I mean really overstuffing -- tempts those who would like to remain temperate; and it causes people to take offense when a dish is declined, however politely.  

One of the more insidious ways, though, is that the dinner guest or houseguest  "on a diet" often can see no way to limit her eating, except to fall into another kind of gluttony:  eating "too daintily."   That is:   "being a picky eater."  

Allergies excepted, it's indeed gluttonous to ask that your host conform the dinner to your imagined dietary requirement.  What's that?  Did I just say "imagined?"  Yes, indeed.  There are no dietary requirements over the time scale of a single meal that are not imagined.  There may be dietary exclusions -- allergies and true food intolerances, as well as religious and philosophical taboos -- but no requirements.  Many exclusions are imaginary, too.  It will not kill a low-carb eater to have a polite quantity of rice or pasta or potatoes.  White flour may not be good for you, but it is not poison in small quantities to most people.   An entire dinner of deep-fried food, with nary a fresh vegetable to be seen, will not destroy a low-fat dieter.  But it is so tempting to sit unhappily at the table and think "Don't they know I can't eat all this stuff?"  Or to conspicuously peel the skin and breading off your chicken and leave it in a sodden pile on your plate.  Or else to become the Guest from Hell -- "Do you have any plain vegetables?  What's in this salad dressing?"  Even following the best advice -- bring a "safe" dish of your own to share -- often carries a subtext of "You make the WRONG food and I am trying to show you what is the RIGHT food." 

Look, I've been there.  I've done this. I spent several years trying to eat low-carb, which is one of the worst offenders in terms of diets for turning its proponents into picky eaters, certain that one bite of dessert will send them out of ketosis and derail them for the next 3 weeks.   I am keeping my fingers crossed that my in-laws and friends don't invade the comboxes and say "Come on Erin, you should talk."  I'm trying to be better!  I swear!

I'm bringing this up trying to make a plug for simple moderation of quantity as a dietary tactic.  Since I stopped following strict dietary regimens and started "not eating so damn much," I find it's a lot easier to be a dinner guest.  There's nothing I can't accept on my plate graciously:  potatoes, bread, meat, dessert.   If there are plenty of vegetables around, it's not hard to fill my plate up with half veg as I try to do on a daily basis.  But even if there aren't,  so that I must subsist (for just this one meal!) on high-calorie, low-nutrition stuff, no one can stop me from taking servings that are small enough to get the right amount of calories at least. 

You know the phrase "I'm saving room for dessert"?  Use it.  Really do save room for dessert, by eating a right-size portion of everything you're served.   You do not have to clean your plate.  Use "No, thank you" as many times as necessary.  And then when dessert comes, rave over it.  And then, if you like, stop before you're done and proclaim yourself too stuffed to eat any more. 

It's as simple as that.  And you can do it without explaining to anyone that you're on a diet, or have special needs, or are... "special."  You can just concentrate on being a gracious guest and having a good time with the company.

Reality:  You may not be able to consume a perfect meal, or even a "good for you" meal, when you are a dinner guest.  But you can always reinforce anti-gluttonous habits.  That includes pickiness.  Cheerfully accepting what's served to you and eating a moderate portion of it -- meaning that the only control you choose to exercise over the menu is self-control, i.e., STOPPING when you have had enough calories -- is part of being a gracious guest, and also an important skill that I think many of us have not developed and that transfers to lots of other eating situations.  And when you leave, you can reflect with pleasure on the habits you have reinforced -- making good choices (not just biochemically healthy choices, but charitable ones) in a situation where choices are, as always, limited.

I wish I had been able to do this when I was studying for my oral prelim.

Going through our homemade phonics flashcards today:  ou,  ie,  th,  ck,  ch,  oy,  oe,  or,  ar.

ou  as in "pronounce" was a new one, introduced yesterday.  Oscar turned it over and stared at it for several seconds.  I started to give him the answer and he held up a hand to stop me, screwing up his face silently.  I waited.  After almost a minute he looked up and pronounced, "/ou/!"

Hey, you got it!  I said. 

I didn't get it, and then I thinked hard about it in my head!  he said, jumping up and down.

You thought really hard about it in your brain until you remembered?

I thinked about it in my head and my heart and my brain!  I thinked about it with MY WHOLE BODY and then I can remember everything!

A desecration.

In Lynn, Massachusetts, just north of Boston, the Eucharist has been stolen:

"It is gravely sacrilegious," said [Rev. James] Gaudreau, after learning that the thieves made off with communion hosts. "We believe (the hosts) are the body and blood of Christ," Gaudreau said.

The hosts were locked inside the tabernacle located on the first floor of the church...

    Gaudreau, piecing together a trail of broken wood, said that the thief ... punched a hole through a wooden cross located on a door to a small room behind the alter. Although valuable gold chalices are kept in a cabinet in the room, only the keys to the tabernacle were removed.

Gaudreau found the keys lying on the altar at the base of the tabernacle Wednesday. The hosts were the only items missing from the church.

A visibly disturbed Gaudreau said he would not speculate as to why only the hosts were stolen, but added, "I have ideas."

Indeed.  There are exactly four reasons why someone might steal the Host from a church:

1. merely as a form of vandalism---wanton destruction
2. to hold it for ransom
3. to send a message
4. in order to abuse it or desecrate it (this includes consuming it)

Vandalism?  Nothing else was damaged.   

Ransom?  Not likely, but the idea has probably occured to folks in the wake of last year's eBay incident, in which some devout Catholics bid hundreds of dollars for a single blessed Host in an attempt to secure it and protect it from desecration by some other bidder.  (eBay has since added Eucharistic hosts to their list of banned items.) 

A message?  Perhaps.  What would it be?  I know what is most important to you, and I hereby demonstrate my contempt for it?  Or you have denied me this thing, but I shall take it from you by force? 

The last possibility is desecration or abuse.  This desecration is evidently not to be a public desecration.  This is a hidden, secret one.  The difference matters.

Were this a public desecration, we might conclude that the perpetrator believes the Host is nothing more than a bit of bread with a lot of kooky superstitious associations attached to it, useful (precisely because of those associations) for making a political statement.  Such desecration would be similar to burning a flag.  This kind of desecration of the Eucharist has happened before.  For example, ACT UP New York boasts this incident on its website:

December 10, 1989: ACT UP and WHAM! (Women's Health Action and Mobilization) co-sponsor our first "Stop the Church" demonstration. 4,500 protesters gather outside St. Patrick's Cathedral [in New York City] to decry the Church's opposition to safer sex education, violent homophobia, and attempts to block access to safe and legal abortions. 111 people are arrested. The news media choose to focus on, and distort, a single Catholic demonstrator's personal protest involving a communion wafer.

That's a public desecration-as-protest (in case you're wondering, it involved spitting it on the ground).   Quite probably the demonstrator does not believe that the Host is special in any real way.  All that is necessary is for him to be aware that it is special to someone else.

A private desecration, on the other hand, is meaningless as protest.  A person who obtains a host for a secret desecration believes it has power, believes that the desecration accomplishes something.  Who knows what that is?  Maybe he (or she), believes it is God, like we do.   Maybe he wishes to hold God in his hands and crush him, knowing it is not likely that a wafer will fight back.  Maybe he fears it is God and hates that fear, intends to prove to himself that it is only bread.  Maybe he is trying to purge his mind of irrational beliefs, and thinks that by desecrating a host he can finally rid himself of its power over him.  Maybe he thinks, in his own twisted superstition, that performing certain actions upon, or in the presence of, a blessed Host will help him obtain what he wants. 

I don't know.  All of these sound crazy to me.  But why risk jail, break and enter, to steal something that is to you only a bit of stale bread?

Bettnet (h/t) wonders why this isn't classified as a hate crime, instead of petty larceny.  I dislike any sort of legislation that smacks of thoughtcrime---let theft be theft, let assault be assault---but theft of an object whose worth is only in its holiness certainly seems to fit the definition.

A very surreal self-discovery.

Happy Catholic links to an article about synesthesia and also to an earlier post about her daughter Hannah's type of synesthesia:

I was at out with my daughters, Hannah and Rose, recently when Hannah suddenly turned to us and said, "When I hear words it means a kind of food in my head." We said, "Huh?" (so eloquent). It turns out that ever since she can remember most words link to a food texture and image in her head. For example "also" is pretzels, "mother" is chocolate milk, "listen" is orange Triaminic. It isn't always food and it doesn't happen with every single word (for instance "squirrel" is just a squirrel) but it happens for practically every word she hears.

I have read about synesthesia before, and I've always wondered what it would be like, although I've never met anyone in person who fessed up to being a synesthete.  The verbal/food crosswiring was one I had never heard of before, so I was reading the post about Hannah with interest as if I were reading about some strange and exotic country, when I got to this part:

It has turned into a parlor trick where she will suddenly say, "'Julie' is pecan pie" or "'lady' is heavy folds of a skirt."

...and suddenly I was dropped in my own neighborhood.  Oh my gosh, I thought.  When she says "lady" is heavy folds of a skirt I know exactly what she means. I know exactly how "lady'"can be heavy folds of a skirt.

Except it isn't (for me) heavy folds of a skirt, it's a shawl, and hair in ringlets, cascading down over shoulders.

This was a little bit of a shock to me.  And I'm still not exactly sure this "counts"---I'm not about to call myself a synesthete or anything, I think I should talk to an expert first.  But there has something else inside the words on the pages I read, and I never knew exactly how to put it until I read that sentence above.   It's the first thing I've ever read a synesthete say that made sense to me.

The "something else inside the word" always seems to me to have a logical connection to the meaning of the word (for example, the shawl, shoulders, and ringlets are part of a picture of a 'lady' that I carry in my head) but it is inextricably linked with the shape of the word as it appears on the page.  And that something else is not a texture; it's kind of a motion or gesture, often with surfaces sliding past one another, though, so the texture of the surfaces are involved. 

It wouldn't be far off to say that there is a sign for every word, which does not correspond to any real sign language, but only the one in my head.  Sometimes there is a sort of facial expression along with it.

Happy Catholic says that for her daughter the food-sensations are stronger when she says the word than when she hears it.  For me, the motion/gestures/whatever appear only when I read the word, or imagine its appearance on a page of text.  And it's stronger with typeset text than with handwritten text.

It's devilishly hard to describe the kinetics I'm thinking of here.  Ironically, it seems almost impossible to translate them into words on a page.  But some of them pop up easily.  I mean, when I thought, "let's try to write some of these down," I immediately thought, "Oh, do 'glasses' first, that's an easy one."

• glasses is a folding up of spindly, clicking jointed things
• sign is a hand held up, rotating at the wrist and being pulled downward at the same time
• moth is... Ever played Hungry Hungry Hippos?  "moth" is a grabbing motion like the one the hippo heads make.
• fathered is a man's hand sliding over the outside of his own thigh.
• interest is a raising of eyebrows.

Words that have two very different meanings have only one kinetic association.  So, in "He's paying six and a half percent interest" and "He followed the discussion with interest," the word interest moves in the same way.  Or take "he has a still in his back yard" vs. "he still hasn't paid me back" vs. "the waters were calm and still."  Still is always the same:  in place, vibrating gently. 

And words that have similar spellings sometimes move similarly.  For example, fathered and lathered are not far apart.   And ladle is a little bit like lady.   And wart is a smaller, truncated version of war.  Synonyms aren't necessarily related, though. 

When I went through the English words for integers one through twelve, I found that many of them are motions and gestures performed by children "of about that age."  I also wrote down a few French words and observed that they are not the same as their English counterparts.

This is something I'm going to have to think about a lot more!

Three things that become or are equated to body, or flesh, one way or another.

Genesis 2:24:

...a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body [some translations:  "one flesh."]

John 1:14:

And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us...

John 6:51, coupled with 1 Corinthians 11:23-24:

...the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.

...the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, "This is my body...'

Instance #1:  Two individual and complete human beings become one flesh, or one body.

Instance #2:  The second person of the Trinity---the Word---becomes flesh. 

Instance #3:  Bread becomes body, or flesh (in fact, the same flesh as in Instance #2).

Can reflection on any of these instances shed light on the others?  One thing that I noticed is that the three "substances" that become flesh occupy three different planes of life:  bread (being baked) is not living but is made from plant life, i.e. non-sentient life; a pair of individual human beings are living, sentient human life, each endowed with a soul, and also (by virtue of their being two of them) a small community or social life; the Word is the divine life. 

What more can be said of this? 

What it might mean to love Jesus.

When I read this meditation from Our World and Welcome To It, I knew I had to blog it---just so I wouldn't forget it:

But what does it mean to love Jesus more than yourself? ...[h]ow would one really know that they love Jesus more than themselves? Do you love Jesus more than your spouse, for example?

...[O]ne way to check your love for Jesus is to think back to the last time you had this thought run through your mind:

"I really shouldn’t be saying [or doing] this."

Now, I’m not necessarily talking about a major sin, here (although it certainly applies to breaking any one of the Ten Commandments). What I’m really thinking about is the urge to say something nasty about somebody at work, or the desire for that extra piece of cake even though the doctor’s told us to try and watch our weight. Something more subtle, in other words. But it’s a perfect opportunity for us to ask ourselves the question "Is this a test of how much I love Jesus?"

...[I]n thinking of how to show our love for Jesus, particularly in wondering if we love Him more than we do ourselves, we should look at these small things as opportunities to prove to ourselves how much we love Him.

So let’s look at that little temptation we’re facing. Maybe it’s not a big deal, maybe it won’t hurt anyone, but I know it’s not the right thing to do. It’s unbecoming to me, it’s beneath my dignity. I may not have changed my mind about how I feel, I might even be justified under the circumstances, but I’m going to purposely refrain from doing it, even though I really want to do it, even though it will make me feel better – because I’m more interested in making Jesus feel better than I am myself.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I probably heard it at least five times today that I can remember, that little voice saying "I really shouldn't be doing this, but..." 

And I'll hear it again tomorrow.  Thanks for pointing out the opportunity.

Gotten, and begotten.

I've been obsessively checking Chez Miscarriage for weeks, hoping I wouldn't miss her baby's birth story. It's up now; look now, because it may be gone later. The author keeps no archives, so I've pieced my understanding of her history together from snippets I read in the comments.

From what I can tell, the author is a "DES baby:" her mother took the drug diethylstilbestrol, and as a result, the author herself has a malformed uterus and has been unable to carry a pregnancy to term. Hundreds of comments appear on each of her posts; I gather that her story is followed by many, many readers. The author's son (whom she calls "Gefilte"---I missed the reason why) was born a few weeks ago. The woman who gave him birth, "Sarah," is a gestational surrogate.

Here are some snippets from the birth story, just in case you miss it.

I remember lying on the living room floor with Sarah's children, eating popcorn and playing Go Fish all night.

I remember the moment at the pre-birth dinner when Sarah introduced me to all her friends as "the baby's mother," and the way her words made us both cry.

I remember sitting up with Sarah through a run of contractions, watching the clock, wondering if this was really happening....

I remember the hospital administrator who attached two matching identity bracelets to Sarah's and my wrists - One for the egg, she said smartly as she clicked my bracelet closed, and one for the uterus....

I remember how our hospital room began to fill up as the day went on and our story got passed around the floor. I remember the nurses who stayed past their shifts, the shy medical students, the residents who kept popping in and giving us the thumbs-up sign. I remember the sense that they were all rooting for us, that they had seen our two families (all of whom were pacing the hall, fielding phone calls, and bringing one another food) and understood what we were trying to do...

And then Gefilte was born - I remember the first moment I saw his face, the way his wide-open eyes stared in amazement at the crowd of people surrounding him - and suddenly everyone was crying and reaching for one another, touching hands, laughing out loud. A nurse lovingly called him "the miracle baby." A resident sat on Sarah's bed and cried, thanking her. My husband and I held one another and wept with joy and relief and amazement.

What I don't remember - although Sarah told me this later - is that immediately after the nurses checked Gefilte and wrapped him in a blanket, I lifted him up and brought him to her, so that she would be the first person to hold him.

Later, everyone went home, and Sarah and I stayed together in the hospital room. I remember that night much more clearly than anything that came before it. We kept Gefilte in a bassinet between our beds, and we stayed up talking while he slept. We looked at him, and at each other, and kept asking in amazement, Can you believe it? Can you believe he's really here? And we reviewed it all, the whole last year of our lives - Do you remember our first telephone conversation? Do you remember the transfer? Did you ever think it would lead to him, to this, to tonight?

When it was morning, before our families returned with breakfast and raucous demands to hold the baby, I said to her, I know you think that you created a life yesterday, but really, you created two. You have renewed me.

She reached for my hand across the bassinet and said, I knew it would happen like this. I knew it would feel like this. I knew he would be like this.

I knew I would love him this much.

The author crafts her writing beautifully---when she's funny, she's really funny, so her blog is a joy to read. I was touched by her willingness to write about the real losses that her baby would experience as a result of his unusual conception and birth. She didn't spell them out, but we all know what they are: he wouldn't be breastfed (although Sarah planned to supply him with pumped breastmilk for a time), he would be transferred from one mother to another. Many of her commenters downplayed those losses, but she herself acknowledged them, and wrote about how she hoped that by acknowledging them she would better be able to compensate.

That's gutsy.

I bring this up because the "problem" of infertility treatments---meaning "intellectual exercise to grapple with"---is difficult for me to wrap my mind around. I mean the ethics of them, the morality of them. In one sense, I am not really called upon to comment on them. I have conceived naturally twice, and given birth naturally twice. I am not in a pastoral position where it is my duty to counsel people who are infertile. If I only keep my mouth shut, I can avoid doing wrong.

But at the same time I struggle with how to feel about them, how to shape the words in my own mind that explain the issue in a way that satisfies me.

I know, accept, affirm, and am thoroughly convinced that a whole constellation of so-called "infertility treatments"---primarily those that involve in vitro fertilization (IVF), whether homologous or heterologous, and artificial insemination, whether homologous or heterologous---are not treatments (for they don't alleviate any disease) but are illicit manipulations of human genetic material, even though they do result in the conception (and, if all goes well, birth) of a new human being.

I understand, accept, affirm, and am thoroughly convinced of the theological arguments supporting that position. Some of them rest on the assumption that in the process of IVF, a large number of embryos are created only to be put at great risk of death or destroyed outright. This is real, and this is clearly wrong; it is easy for any pro-life Catholic to oppose the wanton destruction of any new human life. This is why the restrictions that the Italian people have placed on IVF are true safeguards.

But this so-called collateral damage happens only because technology makes it easier and less expensive to create lots of embryos and waste them rather than to carefully create them one at a time. The high risk of death for each one, too, is an artifact of technology. We could imagine a world in which success rates were so high with each implanted child that hardly any embryos died and "extras" were never created to be destroyed later. So the more important arguments against IVF are the ones that articulate problems that are inherent to the process.

The go-to document for these questions is Donum Vitae. This document came out of the CDF in 1987 and, as such, was written in part by Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Benedict XVI.

The Church's teaching on marriage and human procreation affirms the "inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, makes them capable of the generation of new lives, according to laws inscribed in the very being of man and of woman." This principle, which is based upon the nature of marriage and the intimate connection of the goods of marriage, has well-known consequences on the level of responsible fatherhood and motherhood. "By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination toward man's exalted vocation to parenthood"...

The moral value of the intimate link between the goods of marriage and between the meanings of the conjugal act is based upon the unity of the human being, a unity involving body and spiritual soul. Spouses mutually express their personal love in the "language of the body" which clearly involves both "spousal meanings" and parental ones. The conjugal act by which the couple mutually express their self-gift at the same time expresses openness to the gift of life. It is an act that is inseparably corporal and spiritual. It is in their bodies and through their bodies that the spouses consummate their marriage and are able to become father and mother. In order to respect the language of their bodies and their natural generosity, the conjugal union must take place with respect for its openness to procreation; and the procreation of a person must be the fruit and the result of married love. The origin of the human being thus follows from a procreation that is "linked to the union, not only biological but also spiritual, of the parents, made one by the bond of marriage."Fertilization achieved outside the bodies of the couple remains by this very fact deprived of the meanings and the values which are expressed in the language of the body and in the union of human persons.

Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person. In his unique and unrepeatable origin, the child must be respected and recognized as equal in personal dignity to those who give him life. The human person must be accepted in his parents' act of union and love; the generation of a child must therefore be the fruit of that mutual giving[45] which is realized in the conjugal act wherein the spouses cooperate as servants and not as masters in the work of the Creator who is Love.

In reality, the origin of a human person is the result of an act of giving. The one conceived must be the fruit of his parents' love. He cannot be desired or conceived as the product of an intervention of medical or biological techniques; that would be equivalent to reducing him to an object of scientific technology. No one may subject the coming of a child into the world to conditions of technical efficiency which are to be evaluated according to standards of control and dominion.

The moral relevance of the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and between the goods of marriage, as well as the unity of the human being and the dignity of his origin, demand that the procreation of a human person be brought about as the fruit of the conjugal act specific to the love between spouses.

So there's that. All this I believe, affirm, accept.

And I know, too, that hard cases make bad law, anecdotes make bad data, and---firmly---that emotional reaction to a situation is a poor moral yardstick.

What makes the argument hard to articulate is that the intended end of these illicit means is a good, the best kind of good that our universe brings forth.

The author of Chez Miscarriage knows that.

I've met at least one child, a little girl, whom I know to have been conceived through homologous IVF. I certainly don't have the guts to look her parents in the eye and say "You know, it wasn't right what you did to get her."

(To get her. She was gotten, not begotten. Is that a pithy enough summation for you?)

Fortunately, her parents will probably not ask me my opinion.

Also from Donum Vitae:

...the child has the right, as already mentioned, to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents; and he also has the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception.

It seems like strange language, to me, to talk of how the child has the right not to be conceived artificially, when the child and, therefore, the rights, would not exist without that conception.

But in another situation, the language is almost the same, and yet I find it easier to accept. I'm thinking of a child conceived as a result of rape. In that case, the rapist violates the woman who becomes the child's mother, but he also violates the right of the child to be conceived through an act of mutual self-giving. In failing to respect the mother as a person, the rapist also fails to respect the personhood of any child that might be so conceived.

I don't have any trouble with that language, even though the child, and the rights of the child, came into being after the rape, and as a fruit of the rape.

Is it, in fact, possible to violate a right that does not yet exist, by an act that brings about the existence of those rights? Apparently so. Wrap your mind about that particular moral time warp.

We see darkly through time's glass. Maybe, just maybe, this will make more sense in a perspective where time itself has no meaning. I suppose that I can hang onto that.

Anyway. Also from Donum Vitae:

Although the manner in which human conception is achieved with IVF and ET cannot be approved, every child which comes into the world must in any case be accepted as a living gift of the divine Goodness and must be brought up with love.

Once there was a time when the response to sterility could have been a different one: acceptance of the cross, perhaps expressing generosity in the service of life some other way, through adoption of abandoned children, or through commitment to some cause. But now that other response has been chosen and executed. The wrong is over, and what is left is only mothering and fathering (if I may use that word to describe what fathers do and ought to do throughout the lives of their children). The same as mine, the same as yours.

"It wasn't right what you did to get her." And yet, here she is, a fact on the ground, and more importantly, a person. Accept her, love her, respect her. Somehow, sometime, to respect her personhood has to include acknowledging that mysterious wrong done to her, back in the pre-conception mist, that mysterious wrong that brought her person into being.

Something to think about, and think about some more.

UPDATE:  More here, in a post that attracted some comments from parents of children conceived via artificial insemination.  I think their comments are worth reading.

UPDATE:  Fixed the atrocious formatting.

Better to give than receive---this stuff anyway.

I wish I could take out an advertisement in every church bulletin in the archdiocese with the following message:

Dear well-meaning person,

Please do not donate any clothing that you, yourself, would not want to be seen in. 

Also refrain from donating broken toys.  Thanks ever so much.

Sincerely,  Your Favorite Charity

Today, at the crisis pregnancy center where I volunteer, I sorted through yet another bag of donations that was largely useless.  The contents of the bag were as follows:

• Two boys' shirts, size 6, in good condition.  By themselves, a fine donation.
• One boys' Minnesota Twins jersey with MIENTKIEWICZ on the back. 
• Two pairs of shoes in good condition.  Four pairs of badly beat-up shoes.
• Eight items of clothing with obvious holes, missing buttons, and/or stains.
• Three straps of nylon webbing.  (What were they thinking?  Someone might be able to use this as a belt.)
• One paper bag from Bath and Body Works.
• Two torn garbage bags.

There were also a few items that I assume were intended as toys.  They were:

• An old-fashioned plastic toy phone, the kind with a handset and a cord connecting to a base that had either buttons or a rotary dial on it.  It's hard to tell, because this phone consisted only of the handset. 
• A single interlocking block.  Think "lone Lego."  Except that this one won't actually connect with Lego brand interlocking blocks. 
• A broken calculator.
• The plastic tube left over when the lollipop from one of these had already been eaten.

Honestly, what are people thinking?  That the local clothing shelf is their own personal garbage can?  Even one of the "good" shirts in there---the Mientkiewicz jersey---is a reject in disguise, since Mientkiewicz was traded to Boston in 2004.

A little respect for the people who use these services, please.  If you're too good to wear that shirt, then so are they.

We kept the good-condition shoes and the shirts (even the Mientkiewicz one) and the rest went straight into the garbage.

And another thing:  If you're going to donate clothing, please wash it first.  Especially if it reeks of cat pee or cigarette smoke.  Here's a dirty little secret:  If it needs to be washed, it'll probably get thrown away.  The crisis pregnancy center does not have a washer and dryer.  And---call us prudes---but we are reluctant to offer women dirty clothes to dress their babies in.

And another thing.  Donations of maternity clothes are great.  But XXXL clothing does not make good maternity clothes, except for XXXL women, and then only when the clothing is, in fact, maternity clothing.  I can't count how many donations of size-26-or-larger women's clothes keep coming in.  The only explanation is that the donors think that this stuff is good for pregnant women.  I've been pregnant twice.   It's not.

Well, maybe we just have really big donors.  I mean really generous donors. 

Short Communication: "On Toast."

It is unquestionably evident that the peanut butter toast must be bisected twice along the diagonal. 

This produces four (4) isosceles right triangles, in the case of square toast.  (Applying this method to rectangular toast produces two obtuse and two acute triangles, which does not affect the following analysis.)  Experiments indicate that the triangles are, predominantly, eaten beginning with the vertex opposite the two equal angles.  Current theory holds that the driving force for this behavior is the phenomenon of crust rejection, which is not universal among toddlers but is nevertheless common enough to warrant its consideration as a general case.  Then crust acceptors can be regarded as a special case of the generic toddler, which will be treated at the end of this report.

By the time the crust (which I define self-consistently as that part of the peanut butter toast that is inedible to a crust rejector) is reached, and laid down on the plate, its configuration is approximately linear. 

Since the toddler's face is a convex curve (which can be approximated as a paraboloid for the purposes of contact mechanics, viz. the theory of Hertz), it is tangent to the idealized crust at a single point.  Compression of the curve against the crust (as if to obtain the last bit of jelly) can expand this point into an ellipse, of course, but any such ellipse is finite and limited, as the force of compression increases with the 3/2 power of the contact area.  (The value of 3/2 assumes elastic contact, which is, of course, preposterous, but can be excused on the basis of the fact that my textbook on non-Hertzian contact mechanics has gone missing.)

The competing technique that has the most support is to bisect the toast twice, parallel to the sides.  But this practice, though well-grounded in theory (chiefly because it produces four congruent quadrilaterals that may be conveniently stacked, regardless of the aspect ratio of the original toast, and thus appeals to the toddler who likes making little sandwiches), fails miserably in the laboratory setting. 

For the toast is highly likely to be consumed along the path of least resistance, which clearly begins at the only crust-free vertex of each quadrilateral and proceeds across the toast until the crust is reached.  But the crust of such a quadrilateral extends along two adjacent sides of the quadrilateral, subtending a right angle.  Whereas the linear crust produced using the double-diagonal-bisection method is tangent to the toddler face in the absence of compression force, the crust produced in the double-parallel-bisection method conforms to the toddler face even in the case of  very small compression force, and even in the most idealized situation is guaranteed to make contact in at least two separate locations.  At each of these two locations the situation is comparable to that of the single contact in the double-diagonal-bisection method.

Therefore, the double-parallel-bisection method can be expected to result in toast-face contact over approximately twice the surface area that would result from the double-diagonal-bisection method.  Accordingly, twice the amount of peanut butter will be transferred from the toast to the face. 

The author of this report, therefore, recommends that the double-diagonal-bisection method be employed for all crust-rejecting children.  Crust acceptors are exempt from this recommendation.

Who was that Melchizidek guy again?

Mark and I are in a couples' study group associated with our former parish.  We are reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in chunks rather than in a progression through the book; so, for example, we just finished a study of the seven sacraments.

Holy Orders was tough for us to understand, in part because the theology of it seems to depend so much on a seemingly obscure figure from the Old Testament:  Melchizidek.  We couldn't figure out why he was supposed to be an especially important type of Christ.  The problem gnawed at me a little, and after some reading I understand it a little better.

The explication appears in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of Hebrews.   Here is my summary:

• The nature of a "high priest" is to be called by God from among men.
• Christ is the "priest forever according to the order of Melchizidek" who is addressed in Psalm 110.
• God promised to Abraham, swearing "by himself," that he would be blessed and multiplied, and God delivered.
• Jesus has entered on our behalf "behind the veil" of heaven, analogous to the veil which in the Temple shielded the Holy of Holies, as a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizidek.
• Genesis 14 shows that Melchizidek, king of Salem and priest of God most high, met Abraham as he returned from his defeat of the kings and blessed him.
• Genesis 14 shows that Abraham tithed to Melchizidek.
• Melchizidek's name means "king of righteousness."
• Melchizidek was king of Salem, which means "peace," so he was also "king of peace."
• Genesis 14 doesn't mention his ancestry, birth, or death, which makes him a timeless and eternal figure, "to resemble the Son of God," "a priest forever."
• The levitical priests, the descendants of Levi, who are descendants of Abraham, receive tithes from the rest of Israel, not because they are greater---they are brothers with the rest---but because they are commanded to by the Law.
• But Melchizidek was not of Abraham's ancestry and received tithes and blessed Abraham.
• In the case of the levitical priesthood, mortal men receive tithes; in the case of Melchizidek, a "priest forever" does.
• "One might even say" that Levi himself was tithed (to God via Melchizidek) by Abraham, "for he was still in his father's loins when Melchizidek met him."
• Perfection could not come from the levitical priesthood, "according to the order of Aaron;"  so another priest had to arise "according to the order of Melchizidek."
• This change of priesthood accompanied the change in the law.
• Jesus was of the tribe of Judah, which previously had nothing to do with priesthood.
• Melchizidek became priest not by a law of physical heredity, but "by the power of a life that cannot be destroyed," i.e., "forever."
• The Levitical priests after the order of Aaron did not exchange a covenant with God; they became priests according to the law of their inheritance.  But Psalm 110 says "the Lord has sworn"---that Melchizidek became a priest in a covenant with God.
• The new priesthood is a priesthood of perfect sonship rather than of weakness of man relative to God.

So to sum even further, the priesthood according to the order of Aaron has these characteristics:

1. begins at birth as an inheritance according to the specifications of the Law
2. dies when the priest dies
3. is limited not just to Israel, but to the tribe of Levi within Israel.

But the priesthood according to the order of Melchizidek has these:

1. begins as a covenant between God who calls and the hearer who responds
2. does not die; is permanent
3. extends not just to other tribes, like Judah, but indeed to all the nations.

The simple fact that Melchizidek's priesthood is "forever" in Psalm 110 seems to be the defining characteristic of it:  it is a priesthood that is indelible, and therefore sustained by God.  The form of priesthood that was previously known, the levitical priesthood, is mortal; it dies with the priest.  A priesthood that is "forever" must be by definition different.  The other obvious difference is that it does not arise from heredity; it is not conferred by a natural inheritance, not mediated by a specification in the Law (which had a beginning and, we see, an end).  Instead it arises from something that came before the Law:  the direct call of God and the response of the one called, forming a mutual promise, a covenant.

Covenants precede law; covenants also transcend it, so they survive even when the law passes away.

The point of all this, or at least how it relates to the sacrament of Holy Orders, is that our institutional priesthood is a priesthood that is instituted by Christ after his own pattern, "after the order of Melchizidek," and not a type of Aaron.  Because the idea of a hereditary priesthood is so foreign to common practice, indeed to modernity itself, it seems obvious to us that priests should get their priesthood not from heredity, but by making a personal commitment in response to a vocation.  It was less obvious to people living in the first-century Holy Land, especially to people who were familiar with Israel's practice.  Hence the sharp distinction between Melchizidek and Aaron.

One more thing about this that I thought was pretty sly.  A large number of the more insipid modern hymns have a habit of referring to Jesus mainly as an instrument of "peace" and "justice."  It's a leftover scrap of liberation theology, I think, where the whole point of Christianity is to achieve the ends of earthly justice and earthly peace. 

"nothing more than he can save us, who was justice for the poor, who was rage against the night, who was hope for peaceful people, who was light..."  (some hymn by Tom Conry)

"...when the son of peace and justice fills the earth with radiant light..." (some other hymn by somebody else)

Anyway, I think from now on when I hear such things I will be quietly pleased that to declare Jesus Christ the "king of peace and justice" in those or similar words is, essentially, to identify Him with Melchizidek, the king of Salem, the king of righteousness (aka justice), a sort of hidden proclamation in the reality of the priestly vocation.  Just a private pleasure, but it'll be there nonetheless.