bearing blog

Not a nice way to die.

Horrific elevator accident at my alma mater:

Polakowski was the last of the 24 people to squeeze into the 6-foot-by-6-foot elevator about 11:20 p.m. That’s when the car, estimated to be at least 800 pounds overloaded, plummeted with its doors still open, investigators said.

As someone shouted that the elevator was falling, Polakowski tried to jump or step back up onto the third floor, said Assistant Chief Rick Amweg, of OSU police. ...

The elevator didn’t stop dropping until it wedged the 18-year-old Polakowski against the floor of the third-floor lobby, Amweg said.

I lived in a different dorm that was built around the same time, and I can easily see how this happened.

Prayer requests.

That's the topic, not the substance, of this post.

What do you do when someone asks for prayers? 

• Do you agree, "Yes, I'll pray for you?"  And do you always follow through? 
• Do you pray once or do you continue to pray regularly for the same intention?  Do the intentions "expire?"
• Do you pray right away or do you save it for later, for a regular prayer time?
• Do you formulate a prayer in your own words (O God, please heal Mrs. X of her heart condition) or do you simply offer a memorized prayer, or a rosary, etc.? 
• Do you collect prayer intentions in a little book and pray for "all the intentions" from time to time? 
• Is the answer different for different circumstances?   If a friend asks you, personally, for prayers, do you offer something different than you would for a forwarded e-mail?  Are you ever moved to offer prayers for someone you don't know when you hear or read about them in the newspaper?
• Ever gone the distance and fasted for someone, or offered up other corporeal suffering for them?

I never used to know exactly what to do with prayer requests --- I usually tried to save them for my regular prayer time, but often forgot about them, and would feel guilty about it.  Also I was reluctant to pray for people, sometimes, on the questionable grounds of "Gosh, if I prayed for everybody who needs it, I'd never have time to stop." 

Then I tried a suggestion (I believe it originated with Fr. John Corapi) that impressed me with its simplicity:  If someone requests a prayer, pray for them immediately.  And then consider it done, or if you like, leave it in God's hands. 

The idea is to recite a short prayer, of the type that in Catholic jargon is called an ejaculation:  utterances that are used punctuate the day, each lasting less than a breath.  An example might be:  O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on (name).   Or:  Lord, bless  (name) with peace and strength.  Or a favorite saint might be invoked:  Saint Michael the Archangel, be (name)'s protection.

I like the prayer that was originally suggested:  I place you in the enclosed garden of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  It applies to nearly all circumstances; it is quick to say and easy to remember.  With this interior act, I accept the prayer request and entrust it in turn to the prayers of Our Blessed Mother (Behold, your mother: John 19:27).

Now here is the strange bit.   It takes less than three seconds to pray this prayer, and it can be done silently.  Yet every time I pray it, in the instant before I begin, I feel a strong internal resistance to praying it.  There's no reason, no rationalization, just a sudden feeling of distaste.  I can't remember an occasion when I haven't shaken it off, though.

Am I a bad person?

Because I laughed at this.

Unleash your inner union rep.

Apparently, employee unions don't always appreciate it when an employee receives accomodation of her religious beliefs:

Future requests will follow the same civil-rights law applied in this case, which says employers must accommodate an employee's religious beliefs unless it brings "undue business hardship," he said.

But Michelle Sommers, Local 1005 president, isn't so sure.

"Our union tries to represent all diversity -- whether it be religion, cultural, race, sexual orientation, any of that," she said. "...the union does not agree with the decision to allow drivers to pick which bus they drive based on an advertisement."

The issue:  MetroTransit has allowed an employee, who complained on religious grounds, to drive only buses that do not carry a particular advertisement on the side.  Good for them.

MetroTransit buses carry ads on the side.  About 25 of the buses --- one out of six --- are displaying an ad for a local newspaper aimed at the gay community.   That in and of itself isn't a problem, if you ask me; I'm surrounded by ads for things I don't like or aren't interested in, it's just a fact of life.  The image on the ad is indeed innocuous; it's just a photograph of a young man, smiling.  I can't complain about that.  It doesn't touch Cosmo in terms of provocation.

But the text of the ad has me scratching my head.  What exactly does it mean?  What are they trying to say to their target audience?  Because the text is, "Unleash Your Inner Gay."

I can understand not wanting to drive around with that text.  I'm tired of looking at it, myself.  It seems like one out of every six buses I pass is telling me to Unleash My Inner Gay.   

Who is the target for this ad?  What image do the advertisers hope to put into the minds of the target audience?  Because if the target is the general public, I don't think the juxtaposition of "leash" and "gay" is doing them any PR favors (I can already imagine the kind of search engine hits I am going to get after I post this).   

If the target is people who already self-identify as gay, which seems more likely, I wonder what that message is supposed to mean.  Is there, for instance, a difference between the "Outer Gay" that the advertiser supposes they are showing to the world, and the "Inner Gay" that they keep in the closet, er, I mean, on a leash?   And exactly how is picking up a copy of Lavender going to unleash it? 

And why did this GLBT magazine, in these highly visible ads, choose to ignore the LBT people?  Are they already off the leash?  Perhaps they've been trained to heel.

Does the advertiser think the Twin Cities needs something equivalent to a dog park?  Only for Inner Gays?

Anyway, I think I will be slightly less irritated by the ads now that I know MetroTransit at least respects their employees' objections to them.  Even if the union doesn't.

Bedtime stories.

Over the summer, as Mary Jane's birth approached, we helped the boys (6 and nearly 3) make the transition to sleeping together in another bedroom.  Because one of the purposes was to wean Milo from his late-evening and early-morning nursing sessions, Mark took over the bedtime routine for both boys.   While I lie down to nurse the baby in our bedroom,  Mark supervises toothbrushing, lies down with Oscar and Milo, reads them stories, turns off the light, helps them say their prayers, and waits with them in the dark while the boys drift off to sleep. 

This works pretty well, except that Mark often falls asleep before the boys do.  Sometimes he makes it back to our bedroom around 2 a.m.; other times, his alarm goes off and I have to crawl across the beds to shut it off myself.   

Another drawback:  now that the routine is well established, what do I do when Mark is out of town for the night, as he was last night?  Bedtime has always been the hardest part of Mark's business trips.  When the whole family was sharing a bed, I couldn't stand sleeping between the children (the dreaded "mommy sandwich"), and either child wept pitifully if made to sleep "on the outside."  Even when Oscar was our only little one, the absence of his dad disturbed him into a frenetic state; my strategy then was to close the bedroom door and do crossword puzzles while Oscar ran about and played on the floor, until he collapsed around one-thirty in the morning.

And here was the first three-child overnight without Daddy, the first one with a second bedroom.  I discussed it with Hannah and came up with a plan.

The first part, of course, is to stay out of bed until both boys are actually, you know, tired.  That wasn't too hard, because Tuesday is Family Gym Night in our house.  Oscar has an evening swimming lesson at the Y.  Milo horsed around with other children in the (ahem) "Kids Gym" (aka hourly child care).  So they both had an active evening, plus I intentionally avoided putting Milo down for an afternoon nap.  We ordered pizza for a late supper when we got home, and it arrived around 8:45.  Then I sent them downstairs to play for a while.   We tidied the living room together and climbed the stairs at, I think, 10:47. 

I had left Paddle-to-the-Sea lying around earlier --- it's one of the extra "school" books I planned to read to the children this year.  Oscar was thumbing through it while I swept the living room, and the lively illustrations interested him.  He asked for it for his bedtime story.   A perfect choice.

As the children jumped bouncing onto their bed, I dragged a chair and a footstool into the bedroom and placed them with the back toward the door.   I overturned a laundry basket for a table, and set on it Paddle-to-the-Sea, Little House in the Big Woods, and a quart jar full of ice water.  I turned off the bedroom light and turned on the hall light so it streamed into the bedroom and silhouetted the chair.  "Here are the rules," I said.  "I am going to sit in this chair and read you stories until you fall asleep.  If you sit up, I will stop reading until you lie down.  If you talk to me or ask me questions, I will stop reading until you are quiet.  If you don't like this story, let me know and I will switch to the Laura and Mary book.  Are you ready?"

"Yes," they said.

So I settled myself into the chair, nursing MJ in the sling, and began to tell the adventure of the little carved Indian in his canoe making his way from the hillside above the Nipigon River to Lake Superior.  Milo asked two questions and each time Oscar urged him, "Ssshhh!"  I looked up from time to time to see two pairs of eyes reflecting the hall light back at me.  Then came a time when there was only one pair of eyes; Milo had rolled himself into a ball under the covers.  I kept reading. 

At one point I looked up at Oscar and said, matter-of-factly, "Why don't you close your eyes and try to go to sleep?  You won't miss anything; you can tell me where to start the book again tomorrow."  He turned over immediately and closed his eyes. 

The little carved Indian made it to Duluth, and then to the Apostle Islands, and when I reached the end of a chapter I paused, listening to soft steady breathing and to MJ's suckling grunts.  Carefully I got up, cleared the doorway in case someone came looking for me in the night, and returned to the bedroom.  It was 11:30. 

I'd gotten them to sleep, and it was --- the time that I normally turn out my own light. 

I wonder if this technique would work for Mark?

UPDATE:  Just to clarify, I didn't mean, would it work on Mark. 

The Dawkins delusion.

Amy has a link up to a debate between Richard Dawkins, atheist author of  The God Delusion (yes, I know, he is also a biologist author of many excellent books about evolutionary science, including one that I like very much, but when you write a book called The God Delusion, you must be speaking either as an atheist or as a psychologist), and David Quinn, an Irish Catholic journalist.

I finished The Ancestor's Tale last month feeling that I had learned a great deal about the history of life on earth, and also a great deal more than I wanted to about Dawkins's peculiar obsession with taking jabs at religious people.  In the middle of an otherwise stellar work of popular science, his Tourette-like insult-spitting was distracting.  The man desperately needs an editor.  The podcast linked above is further evidence that he should stick to commenting on fields that he actually understands.

At one point, Dawkins was reduced to stuttering indignantly, "But free will is a very difficult question!  It has nothing to do with religion!"  (Later he says that free will doesn't interest him anyway, a statement that raises some questions as to the man's grasp of metaphysics.)

This brings me to one of my pet peeves.  Why is it that whenever someone wants to compare religious belief to some academic discipline, "science" is always chosen?    Is science compatible with faith?  How do the methods of arriving at scientific orthodoxy compare to the methods of arriving at religious orthodoxy?  Is there an overlap in the spheres of science and faith or are they totally separate?  Can religious people do good scientific research?  Can scientists be devout?  Etc. etc. etc.  You hear this as often from people of faith as from experts in various fields of the natural sciences, and you certainly hear it from people who happen to be both.

After all (taking Christianity as a specific example), the body of Christian belief and Christian methods of inquiry does not exist primarily to answer the question it happens to share with the natural sciences, i.e., "Where did all this stuff come from?" (N.B.  Science doesn't exist primarily to answer this question either.)

Rather, Christianity, as a body of belief and as a set of methods of inquiry (thank you Thomas Aquinas), exists primarily to tell a story and to convince people of its truth and of the course of action recommended by that truth.   

Because of this, a better comparison is to the field of history.   

When Christian experts marshall evidence to support their claims, it's rarely evidence in the sense that scientists are using the word.  Experiments are not performed.  Quantities are not measured.  Samples are not collected.

It's more like evidence in the sense that historians use the word.  There are documents.  There are eyewitness accounts, and second-hand accounts, and accounts that vouch for the integrity of the eyewitnesses.  There are artifacts.  There are letters.  There are testimonies.  That sort of thing.

Now, experiments and measurements and samples can be taken of the preserved documents in order to judge their age, their authenticity, the degree to which scribes' errors have corrupted the texts, that sort of thing.  There's a place for the natural sciences even in historical inquiry.  But ultimately, Christian evidence comes down to us in the form of texts and oral traditions, the voices and handwriting of people who are trying to tell someone something.

It's the same kind of evidence that all our historical inquiry draws upon, at least until photography and audio recordings appeared on the scene in the last few centuries.

This evidence is not the same kind as scientific evidence.  It is a kind of evidence that can provide conclusive, incontrovertible answers to only the most narrowly tailored of questions.  To the answers of most other questions, uncertainty remains.  Was this passage really written by the man who signed his name, or by someone else?  Did the author of this diary really see what he thought he saw, or was he mistaken?  Did the writer of this letter really perform this exploit, or was he exaggerating in order to impress the letter's recipient?  All the surviving contemporaneous accounts of this event agree on its cause; but how do we know that there were not accounts that dispute it, only they have not survived?

Yet this doesn't stop us from making historical assertions without fear of being called "delusional."

Dawkins claims that faith ---presumably including Christianity --- is evil because it involves believing things without any evidence.  Well.  If he restricts "evidence" to mean "that which is directly demonstrable," then history is equally evil.  If he includes documentary evidence, then he makes his statement from a point of ignorance, because there is plenty of documentary evidence for Christian claims about the resurrection, indeed, better evidence than we have for almost anything else that happened so long ago.  If his quibble is with the quality of the documentary evidence, then I'm rather curious to hear his arguments.  I mean, does he believe that Homer existed?  Will he go out on a limb to say who killed Julius Caesar?  In fourteen hundred and ninety two, did Columbus sail the ocean blue?  And so on.

I don't know about you, but I "believe" these things because someone told me, not because someone produced a proof for me.  If that's a delusion, so's all of human culture and philosophy.  But then, perhaps Dawkins, not being so interested in philosophy, would agree.

Saying you're sorry, when you don't feel it.

I don't force my small children to perform social pleasantries.  When someone sings "Say please!" to a little one while dangling a toy out of reach, or loudly reminds an older child "Say thank you," after someone passes the salt --- that grates on my ear.  I don't insist that they kiss or hug anyone.   ("Say goodbye" slips out a lot, but only because it's code for "We're leaving now.")  It feels disrespectful to me to prompt them, as if I don't trust them to be polite on their own, as if I'm pointing out to everyone for my benefit that yes, I am raising my children correctly, DID YOU NOTICE THAT I REMINDED THEM TO SAY "YOU'RE WELCOME?"

Yes, I do teach my children to be polite.  First by modeling, being polite and cheerful to each other in our own home.  It surprised me how early Oscar learned to say "thank you" even without ever being prompted.

Second, when teaching and reminding becomes necessary, I try to do it off stage.  If he is so overjoyed on receiving a present of a new toy that he runs off to play with it before thanking the giver, I sneak over and whisper, "When you get a chance, be sure to tell Aunt So-and-so with words how much you like your present, and say thank you."   And driving over to the relatives' houses on Christmas, I remind them in the car:  Every time someone gives you something, say thank you and smile no matter what you think of the present.  Or:  Remember that when you want something to eat or drink, you must ask for it.

Third, when we're at home in our family, we rehearse.  "WATER!" is met with, "Let's practice that again.  Say someone's name first, and then ask a whole question.  Daddy, can you get me a glass of water?"

(Lately I have noticed a tendency for the children to whine please please please when I've said "no," so I've been de-emphasizing Please as a crucial part of asking for an item.  Isn't "Daddy can you get me a glass of water" just about as polite as "Daddy can you please get me a glass of water?"  I've been sticking to insisting on complete sentences.  That, and carrying around the stock answer, "Please is not for changing minds.  Please is for asking politely.")

So far this philosophy has served our family well.  That is, when I am using it to guide my children, I feel that I'm respectfully helping them; and also, they seem to respond the way I hope they will.

I've had more trouble with "I'm sorry."

When I was a child, I was made to say "I'm sorry" quite a lot, including many times when I wasn't sorry for whatever I had done, and a few times when I hadn't done anything wrong.  I can remember one time when I was about ten, and was made to stay in my room for an entire weekend at my dad and stepmother's house, because I refused to apologize for having spoken rudely to my stepmother.  (I insisted I'd been misunderstood and didn't need to apologize.)  By the time I was a teenager I'd developed the attitude that it was okay to inconvenience people, hurt their feelings, etc., because all that mattered was that you muttered "I'm sorry" and that was it.  Sincerity obviously wasn't important.  Neither was avoiding hurting people in the first place.

This isn't the attitude I wanted my kids to develop.  Also, just as with "please" and "thank you," it grates on me to hear parents prompt "Say you're sorry" the minute their child bumps into someone, and to hear the little one mutter "sorry" like a little robot.  It's just a social convention, right?  Just because they said it doesn't mean they meant it.  And it's not respectful to order a child to say she's sorry in front of everyone right away.  As an adult, if I screw up, don't I often want to apologize to someone later and in private?  That should be all right for our kids, too.  (Even if it doesn't say to the other adults, LOOK AT ME; I AM A RESPONSIBLE PARENT.)

So instead I'd try to encourage empathy, hoping that an appropriate social response would flow more naturally out of that.  Oscar, age two,  bonks another little boy in the head and the child runs away crying to his mother:  I'd whisper to Oscar, "Go see if he's okay."  I mean, there's not really any remorse at that age, but you don't need to feel remorse to go over to someone and say "Are you all right?"  I was thinking of high school age guys, horsing around on the football field, one accidentally trips the other up:  they don't necessarily apologize to each other, but there are still social exchanges:  hey man, you okay?  Yeah.   

I still use "So-and-so is sad, go see if he's okay" with the very little ones.  But it occurred to me recently that "I'm sorry" is more than just a social convention, and can be positive even if the person speaking it is not emotionally repentant. 

Here's what I mean.  I used to think that it was a kind of lying to apologize if you weren't actually, you know, sorry about something:  if you felt that you'd done the right thing; if you thought that the injured party was oversensitive and shouldn't have been offended; if you still were angry and hadn't developed proper remorse yet.

Technically, I suppose, it is lying to say the words "I am sorry" in those circumstances.  But there are other things that can be said.  And why is it important to say them?

Because it gives the offended person an opportunity to forgive you.

I discovered this because of something Oscar started to do spontaneously.   When he was about four, he began to ask not just "Are you okay?"  but also "Will you forgive me?"   I couldn't figure out how he'd learned that until a friend told me, "Erin, you say that to people all the time!  'I forgot to call you yesterday, will you forgive me?'"  (I had no idea I was so melodramatic.)   

This behavior, on Oscar's part, tends to be pretty well-received.  Nobody notices whether a little boy said the Magic Words I'm sorry if he spontaneously asks "Will you forgive me?" instead.

Everyone who feels offended deserves a chance to offer forgiveness, whether the offense is real or not.  (It's even more important to forgive when the offense isn't real.)  And it's much easier to forgive someone if that person has extended an apology, or something that rings like one.

In a sense, the Christian sense, apologies are not ends in themselves.   We are not commanded to apologize to people.  We are commanded to forgive. So the purpose of an apology is the other person's forgiveness.   All apologies are invitations to forgive.   They create a space where an intentional act of forgiveness is welcome.

With that understanding, I see apologies in a whole new light.  Now they are no longer social conventions, to be rattled off sincerely or insincerely.  Now they are acts of charity, acts that help another person feel ready to forgive.

And acts of charity can and should be undertaken whether we feel charitable or not.  Sincerity of feeling is not a requirement. 

So now, if I see that another child is upset because of something my child has done (whether because of misbehavior or because of ordinary playfulness), I can say to my child, "Look.  That little guy is sad because you bumped into him.  Go see if he is okay.  Ask him to forgive you."   And that's something I can really get behind with confidence.

Raising children really does teach you a lot.  In struggling with the "I'm sorry" question, I learned something too.  It's emotionally easier for me to apologize to people now.  I wish I'd understood the reason when I was ten.

Attention.

There's a Lord of the Rings cooperative boardgame.  Says ages 12 and up, though.  What do you think, guys (you know who you are)?

h/t Defective Yeti, like almost all my game-related posts

Four tips I got from the homeschooling co-op meeting.

Our local Catholic homeschoolers' co-op held a meeting this week with a "panel of experts," i.e., three mothers of several children who'd been homeschooling for years sat up front and answered questions.  Last year, Mark reported, the questions were mostly about high-schoolers; this year, the topics were about managing schoolwork with multiple children and preschoolers.

Here are the four most useful ideas that I took away:

1.  Every day, sit down with the youngest child to do her schoolwork first, and work your way up to the oldest.  It's too easy to convince ourselves that the oldest child's work is the most important, because it seems harder, or because we're teaching or guiding those subjects and skills for the first time, or because that work interests us more.   Working one on one with the younger children, giving them the attention they need, right off the bat, helps keep them from being shoved aside and forgotten and put off till the next day.  Meanwhile, the older children get practice with initiative and independent work.

2.   To integrate regular prayer into the school day, hang up signs, e.g., the Meal Blessing over the dining table, the Morning Offering in the room where you begin each day, the Guardian Angel prayer in the children's bedrooms.

3.  Beginning the day with Mom reading aloud to all the children can ease everyone into the school day, even kids who aren't "morning persons."  We can even start while the kids are eating breakfast, saving time; or, if chores are to be done before schoolwork begins, then the promise of a good story can motivate kids to finish their work quickly so they don't miss a word.

4.  Group children's learning together to save time; they will all have different educational paths anyway.   It's perfectly all right to teach two children of different ages on the same level in a particular subject, if that's where they are (e.g. teaching phonics to a precocious reader at the same level as her older brother).  Subjects such as history or nature study can be learned by a group of children, although children of different ages may focus on different aspects of a given subject. If you assign essays to multiple children on the same subject, even if they are "graded" at different levels, you can give the instruction to all at the same time.

One of the more interesting comments came from a mother who allowed her sixteen-year-old to attend the local public school this year, after he made his case (and, of course, after she'd spent many hours and many dollars researching and buying his curriculum materials for the year).  She related an anecdote of how, after several weeks of waking him up after he slept through his 6 AM alarm, her husband finally convinced her to let him take the responsibility of getting up on time --- the end result of which for him was a few days of riding his bike forty minutes to school each way, with her practically sitting on her hands and biting her tongue to stop herself from "rescuing" him.

This led to a discussion about "letting go" in general.  Hearing the different experiences was really eye-opening.  One mother commented about her son who entered the undergraduate seminary this year.  He'd always been a late sleeper and she'd generally let him start his work late, at least in high school, as long as he got it finished.  "Well, at [name of seminary] they have to get up for morning prayers at 5 AM.  I thought, there is no way he is going to last a week there.  But what do you know --- he's doing it, and he says he loves it."

The point I would make with that story, of course, is that it isn't necessarily true that "they'll never learn" a particular skill or habit if they're not made to learn it before it's needed.  Often, a young person learns a skill on a just-in-time basis, when the need for the skill becomes apparent.  (But the seminarian's mother might have been trying to make a different point --- I think she regarded her son's transformation as an instance of divine intervention!)

Big brother, little sisters.

A picture worth a thousand words over at Real Learning, where baby no. 6 inspires this:  "Don't stop having children too soon; there are beautiful, rare gifts that come with that very wide age span of siblings."

(Anyone else think that the young man shown should carry that photo around in his wallet to casually show to prospective dates, later on?)