bearing blog

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.

.

The best way to welcome people is literally to have open doors.

Amy Welborn:

How often is a parish that blathers on the most about “hospitality” also one that is locked up tight during the week?

Here’s the real Catholic “ministry of hospitality” at work: an open church,  decorated in a way that renders the Church, past and present, militant and triumphant, present – in the images of saints, in telling stories – in a way that you can just walk in and be in the midst of it, even in a small way if that’s all that can be managed  -  the crucifix, the Mary and Joseph statues, the Ways of the Cross, a statue of the of the parish’s patron, and some candles and the holy water, of course. All there in the Real Presence of Christ. Welcoming. If that’s all there can be, so be it. But it’s a start – to hospitality – that is, welcoming whoever walks in into the Church.

Read the rest.

Simcha Fisher is a genius.

Because she knows how to craft a humorous post.  Seven quick takes, take that.

(h/t Scrutinies)

My laugh of the day.

Rachel at grasping for objectivity in my subjective life gives us a detailed list, with commentary, of the Google searches that led to her blog.  Read and enjoy.

Probably the three most common searches that I get are "how to stop being Catholic," "savory sweet potato pie," and "bearing in mathematics."

The sad thing is that I could probably provide some kind of a useful answer for all three of these seekers.  I might have to crack an old set of class notes about lubrication flow.  But I wouldn't have to crack a cookbook or a volume of canon law.

In which Betty Duffy goes to a poetry reading and stalks for friends.

Great post that exemplifies the writing you'll find over at Betty Duffy.

Bland and cautious: Two posts that say something I meant to say.

First, from Darwin, a few weeks ago.

[T]here are a good many people who know me in real life who read the blog. More than that, after writing a blog for four-and-a-half years, you get to think of a number of your long-time readers and commenters are friends. The blog becomes like a corner coffee house or bar where the same characters assemble regularly -- with the occasional stranger dropping in as well -- and discuss a range of topics, with everyone knowing the basic terrain of who everyone else is and where everyone is coming from.

The way in which a blog can serve as a combination magazine and coffee shop is, to me, one of the most appealing elements of the medium. It's more personable than simply sending one's words out into the void, knowing that someone out there is reading them but seldom sure of what others think about them. 

At the same time, however, this community element to blog writing makes one particularly aware of the difficulties of writing within a community. As the number of people I know (whether locally or online) who are blog readers increases, I increasingly find myself thinking, "If I write about that, so-and-so might be offended."

Next, from Betty Duffy, and indirectly Pentimento, more recently.

On one of the shelves in the bookstore, I picked up a book for grown-ups that looked interesting. I read the back cover, absorbed the synopsis, then looked for an author bio. “Well what do you know,” I thought, “It’s that angry man on the internet,” and re-shelved the book. I’d recently happened upon the author’s blog, on which he peeled apart the writings of some bad Catholic with whom he took issue.

The author bugged me, not because of his lack of charity. Mean people are a curiosity. He bugged me because his self-appointed Catholic gate-keeping functioned as a sort of literary terrorism, scaring anyone who writes with a “Catholic” next to his or her name out of writing anything interesting.

As Pentimento suggests in a recent comment here:

“If your Catholicism is an openly-stated aspect of your writing and your consciousness, you may find that some of your equally open and self-conscious co-religionists are standing by waiting to judge the way you express your faith and tally how well you live up to it…. I was surprised a year or so ago to receive deeply hurtful criticisms in my comboxes from some who thought my writing was inappropriate, and from others who called my faith into question and even slandered me in the comboxes of a friend. My best friend in real life… took me to task after that because she thought my writing had become bland and cautious.”

Who wouldn’t write cautiously when our writing about our personal experiences as a member of this Catholic Community faces such vicious scrutiny? 

...Here then, is one Catholic blogger who will say without shame, I write this blog only because I enjoy doing it. It is not my apostolate. I might lead you astray. I might cuss. 

I've been a little stilted lately. Like Darwin, I don't conceal my identity terribly hard on my blog. I'm not trying to shield it from friends and family. But I recognize the signs of hesitation sometimes when I write about politics, morality, sometimes even the petty arenas of judgmentalism that arise from parenting style, schooling style, liturgical preferences. No wonder I take refuge in posting so many recipes.

I appreciate posts like this by Darwin and Betty, whose writing I have admired for its candidness. It's nice to be reminded that others are dealing with the same kind of internal censor. And I am beginning to appreciate the value of the blog as a learning environment for... what -- sensitivity maybe? There is a balance to be learned:  a balance between honesty and truth, and charity to the real people who might see themselves (rightly or wrongly) between the lines.

What is the good and true purpose of this blog? It is not my apostolate, either (though see Betty's followup to her post quoted above). I don't write in an attempt to entertain others -- not much anyway -- nor to have a soapbox -- okay, I do my share of venting, I admit it. Even though I pad it with a lot of fluff and kid-pictures and recipes and "funny things that happened to me" bits, things that would be better suited to Facebook if I was the sort of person to have 293 "friends," there is a "main purpose" belied by the actual word-count I spend on various side purposes.

Once during Christmas vacation midway through graduate school, I sat down with a pencil and a new legal pad and I wrote the date at the top and a title, "On the isotropic and unidirectional compactions of compressible packed spheres" or something like that, and I began at the very beginning and I wrote for hours and went straight through, as if I was explaining to someone with absolutely no background, everything I knew, guessed, and was trying to demonstrate about my thesis topic.  I made few corrections and I drew a lot of pictures along the way.  I filled the legal pad over the course of a few days.  With surprisingly few changes, that legal pad became a large chunk of the explication my doctoral thesis, and I still consider it one of the most viscerally satisfying pieces of writing I ever did.

The reason I want to blog is the same reason I have always used that kind of derivation, and also the reason I have always journaled, and also the reason I have always savored (when I can get them) long conversations over a bottle of something or other: figuring something out, breaking sloppy reality down to its elements and reconstructing it into a model that I can wrap my mind around and say "This much I understand."

Lately I think I have been overwhelmed by the thought of who might be reading, and have lost some of the courage I need to lay out what's on my mind.

Well then.  PASS THE BOTTLE.

Memorable and profound sound bite of the day...

...from Jen:

To say no is to protect what you've said yes to.

I will be chewing on that one while I finish cleaning out my closet (which I will now re-classify as "saying no" to all the stuff crammed in there that I can't/won't wear anymore).