bearing blog

"Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits/Who walked back into burning houses to die with men..."

Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic put up a post today in which he quoted a few lines from a poem by C. S. Lewis that I didn't know -- a poem that appeared to mock the idea that the modern world is falling into "paganism," on the grounds that paganism is much cooler and certainly manlier than whatever it is the modern world is falling into today.   I thought my classics-loving 11-year-old would like it, so I went looking.

Here's the poem, Googled and presented for your enjoyment.

Cliche Came Out of Its Cage

by C. S. Lewis

1

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. 
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House 
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, 
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, 
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses 
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. 
Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before 
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands 
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother 
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour 
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave 
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush 
Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped, 
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. 
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, 
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, 
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged 
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die 
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. 
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune 
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; 
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ... 
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? 
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, 
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. 
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll 
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; 
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, 
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, 
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope 
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; 
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die 
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong 
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, 
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. 
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits 
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, 
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals 
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. 
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; 
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event 
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

Fun, isn't it?

Obedience in dissent, with cultural notes.

Simcha has a great post today.  

(Beginning to think I should just have a category called DIRECT LINKS TO SIMCHA FISHER AND MARK BARNES.)

A reader asks her, 

I feel that I am a faithful Catholic- attend Mass, pray regularly, try to follow the Church in all things. But I fall short on this with one issue- I do disagree about the Church’s stance on homosexuality and gay marriage. My beloved sister is a lesbian...I cannot/ do not look at what my sister is doing as wrong. I’m happy she found someone she loves to spend her life with. I love her children, and I’m so happy that they exist. My sister and her partner are raising them wonderfully...

Sometimes conservative Catholic bloggers will talk about how they struggled with a Church teaching, but the post always ends with how they changed, and saw the light, and saw the truth and beauty in the Church’s teachings. But what are you supposed to do when that doesn’t happen?

There's more than one question wrapped up in that post, of course.  Let me pick one excerpt from Simcha's answer:

Sometimes people think that the Church requires us all to be prophets with bullhorns, or prissy grand inquisitors — that the only way we can ally ourselves with the Church is to be thoroughly obnoxious.

Or perhaps we believe that believing something means feeling good about believing it.  These ideas are actually very handy temptations, courtesy of the devil.  They make excellent obstacles to obedience.

So what is the reader supposed to do?  Certainly not shun or treat her sister, the partner, or the children with disdain; certainly not wish them misery, wish that they hadn’t been born.  Certainly not pick over their house, hunting for evidence of degeneracy.  Depending on the situation, the Church may or may not want the reader to even speak to the sister about her lifestyle, now that it’s so firmly established.

Read the whole thing.  The main thrust of the post is that we are all dissenters about something or other, to one degree or another, and because of that this is really a universal problem of the human heart.  If we value obedience --to legitimate authority within its legitimate sphere, of course -- sooner or later we must come up against some principle we haven't taken to heart.  How do we deal with that?  How do we recognize it?

But there's also another question here:  The question of how faithful Catholics are to live in a world, and sometimes in families, with a broader definition of "marriage" than we can parrot back.  It is still an open and vague one.  

For the time being, the official work of the Church in this area is to work to preserve, one way or another, our freedom to assert what we believe to be true about it.  The Church hasn't quite given up the hope that the larger culture can be steered back to an acceptance of something closer to that same truth.

Now, I don't wish to question the wisdom of this approach heavily, because I am not an expert in pastoral techniques of any kind, let alone large-scale culture-steering.  Cynicism is a fault of mine.  

But:  I tend to believe that this particular horse has already left the barn, and that it was my fellow heterosexuals who drove it out foaming at the mouth.  I think we are already in dire need for pastoral assistance in dealing charitably and truthfully with the world around us here.  It is NOT easy, as Simcha's reader's situation (and countless others) demonstrate.

 In many ways it's not new:  Families everywhere have always hosted an endless stream of intra- and inter-familial messages along the lines of "If you do not take steps to demonstrate your approval of my actions, that is the same to me as a demonstration that you do not love me."  If there is any difference now, it's that much more often the "approval" runs against values that transcend the merely cultural or habitual.   We expect family members to get used to a "black sheep" who merely dressed embarrassingly unconventionally, or pursued a career different from the expected one, or joined the "wrong" political party, or married a person from a different class or ethnic group, or wanted to move too far away or stay too close to home.   But -- and this is still a strong, widely held value in the United States -- it's entirely different to expect people to "get used to" being asked to deny, explicitly or implicitly, publically or privately, their religious beliefs.  

Don't we all get impatient with the bishops sometimes?  I think we're long overdue for some real pastoral advice on how to live, and how to love others, in a world where regular denial of our religious beliefs is expected of us -- both through public economic acts and through ordinary social rituals.

It's love and truth.  They are never in conflict -- not really.  One without the other is impossible.  But we ordinary, foolish humans can screw it up royally, trying to carry them both like a burden, and end up delivering neither.

Letter from a liberal homeschooler.

Last week, the left half of the homeschooling-o-sphere exploded with discussion of this piece by Dana Goldstein entitled, "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids:  Why Teaching Children At Home Violates Progressive Values."  

I know, my conservative homeschooling readers might be going "W00t! Bring it on!" but as you can imagine, it contains a lot of stupid.  Homeschooling is a symptom of being rich and white and privileged, we have a duty to keep our children in public schools because we believe in public education, lefty homeschoolers preach sound social values but... you can imagine how well this was received ... don't practice them.

There is an absolutely fantastic piece in response to this today, called "An Open Letter to Dana Goldstein," by Stephanie Baselice.

What is a Liberal Homeschooler? Am I, for you, merely the assumed opposite of a Fundamentalist Christian Libertarian Dominionist Homeschooler? Do you imagine we are a group essentially just like the women at your office, or the last cocktail party you attended, except we are nursing toddlers in the park with our older children readingMark Twain and Philip Pullman nearby? What exactly leads you to presume that your idea of “liberal values” is one that the entirety of non fundamentalist attachment parenting unschoolers would share? Just because we are not raising revolutionaries for God’s Christian Army does not mean we agree with you about the meaning, let alone the value, of public education.

In my personal experience, you are right about some things. Home school families are indeed diversifying as a group. I live in an area where the home school community spans the spectrum from those who want to ensure that their God-fearing children are not sullied by exposure to science to those Dragon Mamas who want to make certain their offspring get into Stanford. Yet there are a wide range of perspectives somewhere between those poles, or somewhere else altogether. Many are families whose children for one reason or another did not thrive in the school system. Many have children with mild to moderate ADD, ADHD, Aspergers or OCD.

There are indeed those parents who prefer to spend family time together, perhaps running a family farm or traveling instead of attending school. There are Homeschoolers of Color who feel their children will be ill served in a public school system which tracks them towards low achievement (many of the Moms I know who meet that criteria are former public school teachers). Plenty of homeschool families I know personally live at or near the poverty line, making lifestyle choices from the bedrock of their values. Choices which involve significant financial sacrifice. 

This is my favorite line:

...You do not own the cause of progress. And the liberal tradition of fighting for public schools is a particular expression of values, not a value in itself.

... because failure to distinguish between values, and a particular expression of values, is a really common error.  For people both on the right and the left.

Another great insight:

When I worked in finance, pre-child days, I had been a registered assistant for an investment adviser. I was seriously underpaid. The number one question we got from couples under 50 was “Our family is so stressed and exhausted…is there some possible way one of us can stay home? ”. My job was to take in all their financial data, and put it together so we could analyze their situation and present financial options. Unless Mrs. Client was an attorney or a physician, or had a job she deeply loved and did not want to leave, I saw the math prove over and over again that these families would be better off financially if Mom stayed home.

Mothers, even highly educated ones, seemed often to bring in just enough money to put these families in a higher tax bracket. Usually two income households lock themselves structurally into this problem by buying more house than they really need—an expense that has recently become all to clear to families struggling with layoffs in the economic crisis. Granted, the families I was working with were usually well to do. But the same problems apply broadly to our whole society. Our lifestyle choices and our incomes are interdependent, not unidirectional. The values perpetuated by consumer culture lead us to view accomplishment in terms of income. It has long been possible to purchase status. If one lets go of that wheel, and is willing to live with less, according to different values, other economic possibilities can and do open up....

This is not to say that fathers cannot do the job of care giving, or that Mothers cannot provide adequately for families. There are all sorts of  ways to structure families. I know many families where the parents both work part time to support homeschooling, or where Dads stay home with kids while Mom works. Some of the non traditional families are gay. Yes, extended breastfeeding does indeed create a prevalence of very traditional looking stay-at-home Moms in the AP and homeschool communities. But this is more a response to the way the consumer society and nuclear family is structured than anything else. Most Moms I know would ideally work part time and spend lots of time at home with their little ones. In a tribal situation, there is extended family and lots of help with the work of raising a family. My homeschooling group has come to be almost a tribe to me. We help each other. All the time. Because that is how we wish to live. Relationships have replaced the need for revenue in many areas of my life.

Read the whole thing.  As I've said time and time again, one of the greatest things about homeschooling is the way it brings into agreement people from across the political spectrum.  Liberal and conservative homeschoolers often have more in common than they have separating them.

Hey girl.

A year or two ago I found out through FB that several women who had been high school classmates, and whom I hadn't seen or spoken to since graduation, were homeschooling their kids.  We had a few brief exchanges, and it was fun to discover that we had that in common, especially in the cases where we hadn't had much in common at all when we were in high school.

That's a little preamble to pointing out this Tumblr site that Anne H, who went to high school with me, put together.  Have fun reading Homeschool Ryan Gosling.

"Catholic guilt."

A good piece on it by Calah at Barefoot and Pregnant.

Well, this is a timely article: How to stick to your resolutions.

I was talking to Mark this evening about trying to nail down the general principles of behavioral change -- not the list of "handy weight loss tips," but the general principles that I've followed to choose my new, permanent habits and to make them stick.  

All right, I'm fessing up:  I've been tossing around the idea of putting these disconnected eating-and-exercise blog posts into a longer and more organized form.  What I'm not yet sure about is focus:  gluttony?  personal change in general?  willpower defeating?  straight-up weight loss?

Anyway, I was amused tonight to encounter this article from the NYT's John Tierney, "Be It Resolved," which is very much like the sort of thing I was envisioning writing.

IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions:

1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.

2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.

3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.

Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.

They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.

Well, that explains a lot.  Dieting is hard because low blood sugar depletes your willpower!  

But this is the paragraph in the article that really resonated with me (emphasis mine):

One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.

This.  This.  A thousand times this.  Using willpower sucks, so you have to exert it in advance.  So much of what worked for me is about this very principle.

The article goes on to give a somewhat outlandish anecdote and then from it derives some strategies that ring very true to me:

• Set one clear goal at a time
• Precommit (like Odysseus lashing himself  to the mast, remove your options to break your resolution)
• Be accountable to someone else, and plan to pay a real penalty if you don't reach your goal
• Keep track of how you are doing
• Don't overreact to a lapse by saying "what the hell" and figuring the day's already ruined
• Tell yourself you can have some later (rather than swearing off pleasures for good)
• Reward yourself, or find reward in your actions, often.

I will have to spend some time thinking about this -- but maybe the first step is to read the book about willpower that is referenced in the article.

Choosing peace, or something like peace, anyway.

ChristyP sent me a link at just the right time for me yesterday.  The post, from a blog I'd not seen before (Steady Mom:  On the Journey toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood) is short enough that I'm just going to repost it.  Here you go (permalink here):

A few days ago I sat down in the morning, per my usual routine, to make my daily to-do list. As often happens, there were more items to do that day than there was time for the doing. 

Anxiety and overwhelm began to threaten me, though I tried to ignore their taunts.

Still the nagging thought kept creeping back, "How exactly am I going to get all this done?"

Suddenly God whispered to my heart. What He said surprised me, changed my outlook, and altered the entire direction of my day--of all my days. He said,

"Choose peace over productivity."

Peace is the goal of our days.

Peace is THE goal of our days.

At the top of your to-do list, write it - Peace.

If anything tries to threaten your goal, it gets crossed off immediately. Don't worship at the altar of busyness and allow the very heartbeat of your family to suffer.

Let me spell it out as a reminder for us all:

Laundry isn't more important than peace.

Cleaning isn't more important than peace.

Homeschooling isn't more important than peace.

The family budget isn't more important than peace.

We're better off getting only one thing done in an atmosphere of peace than crossing off multiple tasks weighing fretfully on our shoulders. I know, because just this morning I forgot the lesson already, and paid the price by handing over the mood of our home. It wasn't worth it.

What will our children remember when they leave our homes--how busy Mom was or how joyful she made them feel?

Choose peace over productivity.

Yes, this is nothing new.  Yes, this is absolutely a message I've heard before in one form or another and attempted to assimilate.  Something about the way it's put, though, makes me want to tape it to my bathroom mirror.  Well, I'll do the next best thing and stick the blog in my RSS reader for a probationary period to see if she says anything else I like!

She has a followup post, on What Choosing Peace Does NOT Mean:

Here's what choosing peace does NOT mean:

- staying in your pajamas all day

- reading blogs when you should be playing with your kids

- feeding your children chicken nuggets every night

- spreading piles of laundry around the house

- leaving dishes to pile up in the sink all day

- ignoring your children because you just can't take the bickering anymore

[cough, erm, yeah]

- letting mess accumulate while you chant "I'm peaceful, I'm peaceful."

...

Choosing peace does mean:

- That people are more important than tasks

- That you have adequate expectations of yourself, depending on what season of life you're in

- That you try to stop what you're doing to look your children in the eye when they interrupt you...

We will not find peace at the end of our to-do list. That effort has a name: striving. It promises peace, but in the effort required it steals the very promise away.

This is one of those things that I, personally, need to be reminded of again and again and again.  

Once for a friend's wedding shower I gave her a little hanging tile, made up of mosaic bits that spelled out, "Peace begins at home."  I was thinking mainly of raising children "peacefully" at the time -- I think my oldest couldn't have been more than two -- I was still developing my style of discipline (aw heck, aren't I still?) and I'm sure that's what I was thinking about, about raising kids nonviolently in an atmosphere of love so that they wouldn't grow up to perpetuate senseless violence.  I wasn't at all thinking about serenity in the home in the moment.  Only about somehow engendering "peace" there and sending it out into the world to do its work.

Even at the time, I'm not sure that "peace" is the word I would have used, precisely, to mean what I sought then and what I still wish I had.  (I thought it was a good choice of word for what my friend would want, though.)  It is too worn from overuse, especially in world affairs; connotes too much the relationships between and among large groups of people, and not quite enough the relationships between individuals.  Connotes for me, too much, the state of avoiding conflict rather than the state of dealing productively with conflict or even the state of living blissfully without conflict.

"Peace" isn't, I think, the name of the thing that is the goal of my days.  However, either Steady Mom and I are both longing for the same thing, to which we choose to give different names, or else her reminders are bound to produce both peace and the thing that I want.

I'm still not sure what word would be better.  Maybe I am just looking for "love" in its active sense.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this blog and read more.

UPDATE:  Melanie responds with a very insightful post.  Go read!

"Looking up."

Marc at Bad Catholic:

"If you find yourself drenched in lemonade, but know that you haven't drenched yourself, what is left to conclude? That someone else has drenched you. If you find yourself drenched in worth, but know that you have no reason to feel worth, what is left to conclude? That someone has given you worth. It's a joke, see, because you're drenched in lemonade, and worth everything! Who among you would find themselves drenched in lemonade, look around and realize they could not have drenched themselves, and thus concluded that they were not, in fact, ever drenched."

RTWT.

More of other people's writing: WYD edition.

Great post from World Youth Day by Marc at BadCatholic.

A group of Mexican girls, here for World Youth Day, walked in and prayed with us, asking us afterwards whether we were discerning the priesthood. Assumedly, singing is a sure sign of future celibacy. Now I, in response, wished to say, "Maybe, but I am in love with a girl right now." But that's a hard sentence to form, and I speak the least Spanish of my friends. So I decided to dumb it down and tell the girls, in some what of a joke, "No, I like girls." So, rifling through my limited vocabulary, I came up with the foolproof sentence: "No, me gusta chicas." I was perturbed to notice, immediately after delivering my impeccable linguistic one-liner, a shocked and holding-back-laughter expression take hold of each of the girls. What my Spanish-speaking friend Nick immediately explained to me, and to them, was that "me gusta chicas" basically means, at least to these Mexican girls, "I find girls sexually pleasing." So re-imagine their devout question.

"Are you considering being priests?"
(I, full of confidence) "No, you girls are too hot."

Oh well. 

The rest of the post, entitled, "How to Speak Catholic," describes two more surprising encounters with language barriers.  Read it all.

I will be kicking myself for the rest of my life that I didn't make it to any World Youth Days while I was, even on a technicality, a youth.

Introduction to the Devout Life: 4-1, "Worldly Wisdom."

An index of all posts on St. Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life is here.

***

As I wrote in the last post, Part 4 of the book is kind of the "Troubleshooting" section of the how-to-live-devotedly manual.  And the very first chapter is almost like a warning:  "You will have this kind of problem."  What's the problem?  In short, other people will wonder what's wrong with you.

It is a fantastic chapter.  And, I might add, it is actually much more widely applicable.  It would apply to anyone who makes a sincere effort to change their own character and behavior in any sense, not just the spiritual one.  Someone who decides to get clean and sober; someone who decides to quit goofing off and get a real job; someone who decides to get out of debt; somebody who decides to start taking care of their body instead of abusing it -- all these people could gain some wisdom from this chapter.  Bottom line, change-for-the-better threatens a lot of the friends, acquaintances and family in this world, and sometimes they try to undermine it.  

So let's take a look at St. Francis's words.

As soon as worldly people see you bent upon the devout life they will shower you with mockery and detraction.  

• The more malicious will attribute your change to hypocrisy and insincerity, saying you have turned to God only because the world has disappointed you.  
• Your friends will raise countless objections which they consider wise and charitable, saying that it will only make you morose and unbearable; that it will discredit you in the eyes of the world; that you will grow old before your time; that your domestic affairs will suffer; that those who live in the world must live accordingly and that you can get to heaven without all these mysteries and so on.  

...They are interested neither in your health nor in your affairs.

Wake up! says St. Francis.   What's the real reason for the objections?  It can't be for your own good, because they approve of many things that would be worse for you and your business:

We have seen men and women spend, not only the whole night, but several nights in succession, playing cards or chess... And yet it does not disturb worldly people in the least; but if we spend an hour in meditation or are noticed getting up in the morning earlier than usual to go to Holy Communion, they send for a doctor at once to cure us of melancholy and jaundice!  

They can spend thirty nights in dancing without experiencing any ill effects but if they have to spend one Christmas night in watching they are full of coughs and complaints the next day.

Ha.  I could add an example from my own life back in college:  "She is perfectly content to eat M&Ms out of the vending machine for breakfast, but ask her to eat two lighter meals on Ash Wednesday and she frets about not getting enough protein."

St. Francis points out that critical people are generally hypocritical and inconsistent:  they will stick to one principle when it suits them, and to the opposite principle when the wind changes.

It is quite obvious that the world is an unjust judge:  gracious and forbearing with its own children, but harsh and rigorous with the children of God. ... "When John came, he would neither eat nor drink, and they said of him that he was possessed.  When the Son of Man came, he ate and drank with them, and of him they said:  Here is a glutton; he loves wine."  (Mt 11:18-19)

You just can't win with these people:

The worldly will be scandalized, Philothea, if we condescend to laugh, play, or dance in their company, but if we refuse, they will call us melancholy hypocrites.  If we dress well they will attribute it to a bad motive; if we dress simply they will attribute it to meanness.

Whatever you do, others will be able to put an unattractive spin on it, and they'll hold you to an artificially high standard:

 They will call our joy dissipation, our self-denial sadness, their jaundiced gaze never satisfied.  They will magnify our imperfections into sins, count our venial sins as mortal and our sins of frailty as sins of malice....[I]f they cannot find fault with our actions, they censure our intentions.

...The worldly are against us whatever we do; if we are in the confessional for a long time, they express surprise that we have so much to confess; if we are only in there for a short time they will say that we have not confessed everything.  

They will watch us carefully; one word of anger and they will say we have an ungovernable temper; if we show prudence in our affairs they will say we are avaricious; if we are gentle they will call us foolish, while as for them, their anger is courage, their avarice economy, their overfamiliarity honest fun...

I have to say that I notice people of all stripes having this attitude towards their political opponents.  Haven't you?

So, what to do?

We must ignore such blindness, Philothea; let them cry out like owls trying to disturb the birds of day as much as they like while we go serenely on our way, unwavering in our resolves; our very perseverance will convince them that we have dedicated ourselves to God and embraced a devout life.

Ignore the naysayers, and be persistent.  After all, it's understandable that we might not be taken seriously at first:

...[H]ypocrisy is hard to distinguish from true virtue externally; the test lies in the fact that hypocrisy is inconstant and vanishes like smoke whereas true virtue is ever firm and constant.

Consider that the criticism might even be good for us:

To meet with reproaches and criticisms at the beginning of our spiritual life helps to establish our devotion, for it prevents us from falling in to pride and vanity...

A closing thought:

We are crucified to the world and the world should stand crucified to us; it counts us fools; let us count it demented.

.