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Introduction to the Devout Life 4-12. Sadness.

(An index of all posts on St. Francis de Sales' work Introduction to the Devout Life is here.  A post outlining part 4 of the book is here.)

 In our last look at Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales showed that anxiety's chief danger is that it can lead to a destructive sadness which I think we can even call depression.  He treats this sadness or remorse in the next chapter, 4-12.  

As usual, in what follows, I have broken up paragraphs and modified punctuation a bit to improve blogginess.

"Supernatural remorse," says St. Paul, "leads to an abiding and salutary change of heart, whereas the world's remorse leads to death" (2 Cor 7:10).  Sadness, then, may be good or evil, depending on its effect, though it produces many more evil effects than good....

...[T]here are only two [good effects]:

1.  
   1. compassion
   2. repentance

...[I]t produces six bad effects:

1.  
   1. anxiety
   2. discouragement
   3. anger
   4. jealousy
   5. envy
   6. impatience

Here is a perfect example of why St. Francis appeals to me so much:  he makes lists.

We should be suspicious of sadness that interrupts our objectively virtuous activities:

The devil takes advantage of sadness to tempt the good, striving to make them sorrowful in their virtue as he strives to make the wicked rejoice in their sins, and as he can only tempt us to evil by making it appear attractive, so he can only tempt us away from what is good by making it appear unattractive.  He delights to see us sad and despondent because he is such himself for all eternity and wishes everyone to be as he is.

And that reminds me, another reason why we should strive to be cheerful and not morose about our Christian life is that we have a responsibility not to make it more unattractive to others.  Who would want to take on a life that makes everybody complain all the time?   At the same time, we need to seek support and give support by being honest about our frustrations and struggles.  (Cf. the post about lactational amenorrhea a few days ago) Can we be honest and struggling and cheerful at the same time?  Some discernment is necessary for this, for sure.  Clearly this is one of the reasons why God gave us a sense of humor.

Here are Francis's diagnostic criteria for "evil sadness:"

• • disturbs the soul
  • leads to disquiet and inordinate fear
  • breeds distaste for prayer
  • clouds the mind
  • undermines our judgment, resolution, and courage
  • saps our energy
  • robs our soul of consolation
  • leaves our soul powerless and almost paralysed

I guess if none of that is happening to you, you might have the good kind of sadness.

If such sadness should come upon you... make use of the following remedies:

Pray.  "Is one of you unhappy?" says St. James, "let him fall to prayer" (James 5:13) make use of aspirations, either vocal or interior, which tend to confidence and love, for example:  "O God so merciful and good!" "My loving Saviour!" "God of my heart, my joy and hope!" ... and so on.

Stand firm.  Resist any tendency to sadness most vigorously and do not falter because your efforts seem to be made half-heartedly and without fervour, for the devil will cease to trouble you when he sees that instead of being wearied by sadness you continue your good works and gain all the more merit as a result.

Sing.  Sing spiritual canticles... Remember how David, by singing psalms, drove away the evil spirit which so oppressed Saul.

[K]eep yourself occupied with exterior works as varied as possible, to divert your mind from the cause of your sadness, to purify your heart and increase your fervour; for sadness makes us lukewarm.

Express your devotion outwardly even though without sensible fervour; for example, embrace the crucifix, clasp it to your breast; kiss our Lord's hands and feet; raise your hands to heaven in supplication; make ... acts of love and confidence...

Voluntary physical suffering merits spiritual consolation, while the soul is diverted from its interior sufferings by these exterior ones....

Holy Communion is an excellent remedy...

[Make your sadness] known humbly and sincerely to your confessor...

[S]pend as much time as possible in the company of spiritual persons...

Finally, resign yourself into God's hands and strive to bear patiently the sadness which troubles you... confident that, having tested you, God will deliver you from this trial.

Well, that's quite a lot of advice.

I confess that at this point, I see a pattern.  Although Francis does suggest some specific remedies for specific problems ... Rather obviously, Francis suggests prayer, confession, and Holy Communion as remedies for basically everything that can go wrong with the devout life.  

It's not so much that this surprises me as it strikes me as a little inefficient -- maybe Chapter Four should have had a general bit of advice at the beginning along the lines of "No matter what, try prayer, confession, and Communion first."

 I'm beginning to think that prayer, confession, and Holy Communion -- heck, you may as well just go to Mass!  get them all taken care of at once! -- is kind of the equivalent of "turn the blasted thing off and turn it on again.  See if that fixes it."

"...it is not a case of being left wing or right wing, but being for Christ."

This quote, linked to on Rich Leonardi's blog today, is about Pope Benedict's ideas, but it is true about the political thoughts of anyone who is meaningfully Christian.  

Ignatius Insight: What misunderstandings or misrepresentations of Benedict's thinking do you find most bothersome or in need of correction?

Dr. Rowland: Unfortunately many people, in particular journalists, can only think in dialectical categories like: left-wing, right-wing, progressive, conservative. They never ask questions like: conserve what? or progress toward what? It is very difficult to present Ratzinger's ideas in sound-bites without doing violence to the nuances.

There is, for example, a sense in which it may well be right to classify Ratzinger as a progressive in 1964 and a conservative today but what changed is not the actual theological beliefs held by Ratzinger, but the historical and theological contexts. In 1964 to be progressive meant wanting to introduce some flexibility into a theological framework which had become ossified and dry. It meant being critical of Su‡rezian Thomism. Today, being progressive means being in favour of contraceptives, women priests, homosexual "marriage" and Marty Haugen.

As Cardinal Francis George has often written, it is not a case of being left wing or right wing, but being for Christ. In some social contexts that will look right wing, in others, left-wing, but these terms and labels are not the standard, and nor are they stable.

 

(emphasis mine).

Trying to describe our absolute positions in words like "conservative," "progressive," "left-wing," "right-wing" is, bluntly, useless.

End of an era.

Derek Lowe, defending chemistry blogging against the usual charges (no fact-checking, no editorial oversight, yadda yadda yadda) is absolutely right:

There is indeed a lot of inaccurate nonsense on the internet. And everyone should read what they find online with a thought to who's written it, and why. But everyone should do the same with stuff that's printed on flattened sheets of dead trees, too, even if there are flattened-dead-tree-sheet editors and fact checkers. This is no place to list the stories that have been horribly messed up by even the most respectable of the old media. I'm thinking of a good list right now; any well-informed person should be able to. (If you can't, you're not as well-informed as you think you are). And there is indeed a lot of good science reporting in newspapers and magazines, although we can't ignore the fact that there's an awful lot of lazy and sloppy science reporting, too.

But there's a lot of inaccurate nonsense in the peer-reviewed literature, too. Without editors and reviewers there would surely be more, but too much junk gets through as it is. And if you want to see that stuff flagged, you'll do well to read the chemistry blogs.

Professional journalists -- even (especially?) sci-tech journalists -- don't have a monopoly on the wide dissemination of sci-tech information anymore.  And we're all better off for it.

Seven in a row. And a new ID.

This morning I'm going back into "weight loss mode" for, I think, the first time since I got back down to my postpartum goal weight.  I've been within bounds for close to three months -- not a bad run, considering I'm dealing with the ups and downs of breastfeeding.

(A note on that -- When I was heavy, I didn't even notice that breastfeeding made me need more food.  I figure I was already eating so much and throwing off the excess in heat, that my body just threw off less heat and fed the baby from that.  Now it's very, very obvious that feeding the baby means I have to eat more, though the exact quantity is difficult to hit.)

I weigh daily.  One way I make this work for me -- one rule -- is that I return to stricter habits when I have seven readings in a row that are above my target weight of 112.  It goes very nicely with daily weighings (seven days = one week) and it's not hard to remember.   Seven is enough data points that a trend can be visible among the random ups-and-downs.  

I still have a hard time understanding why people say "Oh, I can't weigh daily."  Data from the National Weight Control Registry has me convinced that daily weighing is not harmful (even though you will frequently see that advice on dieting sites and in books as if there was evidence that daily weighing stalls weight loss all by itself).  

I guess I can understand it depending on the personality.  I have to hold myself back from restricting my habits too soon -- like, oh no, I had a bad food day and the next day the scale reads 2 lbs higher, I better act NOW.   Well, I hadn't thought of this possibility, but it can act the other way too -- a friend of mine told me she doesn't weigh daily because, when she happens to have a lower reading, it's easy to convince herself she "has room" to go off habits that day.  

(Which is a normal part of maintenance -- but is an act of pure self-sabotage in attempts to reduce weight.  "The data shows that what I've been doing is working!  I should do the opposite today!")

Anyway.  Seven "high" days in a row, and it's time to check my habits.  I consider myself back in maintenance after I bring my five-day running average under the target.  That can take a few weeks.  

Habit number one:  tomato juice and boiled egg for breakfast...

 

 * * *

In other news, my new driver's license arrived today.  It strikes me as a really stupid idea to scan pictures of my ID and put them on my blog, so I won't, but let me tell you -- the difference between the old one and the new one is really cool.  I keep putting them side by side and looking at them.

A couple of times over the last couple of years, I pulled my driver's license out to prove to someone that I used to be heavy.  (The weight listed on my old DL is 160 lbs; my new one, 112.)  I think I'll go on carrying the old one in a spare slot in my wallet.

 

Introduction to the Devout Life 4-11: Troubleshooting anxiety.

(An index of all posts on St. Francis de Sales' work Introduction to the Devout Life is here.  A post outlining part 4 of the book is here.)

 

Still with me, friends?

Francis begins his chapter on anxiety by writing about sadness.  Sadness leads to anxiety and "anxiety in its turn increases sadness and makes it extremely dangerous."

Today I think we might call that "extremely dangerous" sadness by a different name:  depression.  We might translate Francis into modern terms by saying that we react to evil with sadness; that this normal sadness can develop into anxiety; and that anxiety can develop into depression, of which he says:  "We become overwhelmed with anguish and distress, and feel so weak and discouraged that the evil seems incurable."  The next chapter treats sadness in more detail, and we'll come to that one in another post.

Francis gives the names "trouble," "worry," and "disquiet" to both anxiety and its cousin, over-eagerness.  Anxiety is disquiet about a bad thing that one fears; over-eagerness, disquiet about a good thing that one hopes for; but Francis regards either kind of disquiet as a great evil that can befall us, "the greatest... except sin."  According to him, we want to nip it in the bud.  And since in his view it's a cause of depression, no wonder.  

Just as revolt and sedition in a country cause havoc and sap its resistance to a foreign invasion, so we, when troubled and worried, are unable to preserve the virtues we have already acquired or resist the temptations of the devil...

The comparison to "revolt and sedition" connotes that same idea of a self divided into parts.  Part of me wants to fight my base tendencies, but part of me resists fighting, fears fighting, believes it does no good -- a self-fulfilling belief.  That part of me wants to be right, doesn't it?  Wants to be proved right by failing?

So, here is Francis's explanation and prescription.

Anxiety arises from a desire to be delivered from the evil we experience or to obtain some good for which we hope, yet nothing so aggravates the evil or impedes the good as tis overeagerness and anxiety.  Birds remain ensnared because they flutter in their wild attempts to escape from the net, and in doing so get all the more entangled,

so, when you desire to be delivered from some evil or to obtain some good, first, strive, above all, for peace and tranquillity.

•  
  •   First compose your judgment and your will...
  • [T]hen seek to attain your end quietly and gently, taking the most suitable means one at a time. 
  • ...Examine several times a day, but at least morning and evening, whether your soul really is in your hands or whether some passion or anxiety has taken possession of it; whether your heart is under control or has escaped and become carried away by inordinate love, hatred, envy, avarice, fear, weariness, or joy;
  • in which case you must, above all, recapture it and restore it to the presence of God, subjecting its feelings and desires to his will.
  • When you experience disquiet, turn to God and resolve not to do what you desire until the disquiet has passed...
  • ...[but if] it is something which cannot be deferred,.... you must restrain, control, and moderate your desire as far as possible with gentleness and tranquillity, acting according to reason, not mere inclination.
  • If you can make known your disquietude to your confessor, or at least to some good and faithful friend, be assured  that you will at once find relief.

This is a very important chapter for me. Anxiousness about the many things I have to do and wish to do is a major weakness.  Let's look at the prescription in a bit more detail.

First, a reminder of what Francis means by "gently:"

"Gently" does not mean "negligently" but "without eagerness, anxiety and disquiet," otherwise, instead of attaining your end, you will only make everything far worse and get more and more entangled [like the snared birds mentioned before].

About your soul being "in your hands" -- that comes from Psalm 118, and the line might be a nice aspiration-type prayer or mantra:  

I carry my life in my hands, yet am I ever mindful of thy law.

And how about that reminder of the things that can carry away your heart?  Not just the evils of hatred, envy, and avarice or the neutral fear and weariness, but also love and joy (if inordinate) can create disquiet in us.  Carried away by these we can make poor choices or be seized with disappointment and sadness when things turn out differently than we had hoped.

ROI.

Kind of a neat article discussing the return-on-investment of college degrees.  The data comes from this ranking of colleges by ROI (some appear twice because of separate calculations for in-state and out-of-state tuition).  My almae matres performed reasonably well, I'm glad to see.

In general, ROI increases with selectivity, but it varies so widely within selectivity categories that you cannot use selectivity as a proxy for value.

It seems reasonable to reject outright an institution whose ROI is less than the cost of borrowing the money to finance the degree (about 7% right now).  There's a list of 17 failures at the first link.

Recovery.

About four weeks ago I came down with an awful cold, and then one day I had a terrible migraine, and then we went out of town for the weekend, and then I contracted an eye infection at LensCrafters, and then my in-laws came to visit this weekend, and what do you know: I hadn't managed my regular exercise schedule for almost a month.

I did get to the gym a couple of times in there, but not more than that.

And do you know, I felt real resistance (sloth!) when it came time to start going again. Just a sort of "nah, I could go tomorrow instead."   Running seemed yucky, and swimming suddenly seemed complicated.   I can see how one week could turn into one month could turn into never again.  It kind of frightened me.  

Luckily, I always enjoy swimming, and I know it, so all I had to overcome was the "complicated" bit.  The most important part of any workout is to show up for it.  "I'll show up.  If the 4yo won't stay in the child care, or the baby nurses until I run out of time, or the goggles hurt my recovering eye, I don't have to go through with it."  I showed up, it went fine (except that I'm already noticeably slower and weaker -- wow that happens fast), and I think I'm back on track now.

It's just sort of astonishing how dependent the belief "I have to do this three times a week" is on the evidence.  I mean, I don't have to do it three times a week.  Clearly I didn't self-destruct in my month of illness and schedule conflicts.  And so I could stop exercising.  I don't want to stop.  Maybe I have to pretend to myself that I can't stop, so that I won't.

On the other hand, I guess I didn't stop.  So maybe I'm safe even knowing the reality that I hold the choice in my own hands all the time.  It feels dangerous.

Second page! Woo-hoo!

This has never happened before.  The comments on my "What do you mean by reliable?" post about breastfeeding and lactational amenorrhea have gone onto a second page.  Give yourselves a hand.

(There's a tiny link at the bottom of the page of comments that points you there.  I wish it was bigger.)

Having co-workers, and extracting details.

The other day Hannah and I sat down over our after-school tea and hashed out a problem we'd been having with the oldest kids' school.  We needed to try a "new thing" and after tossing out a few scenarios and undergoing some careful self-examination, we thought of a different thing to try.  We aren't sure it will "work" (oh these poor  guinea pigs oldest children) but we can at least feel confident that what we'll  try will teach somebody something.

And afterwards, we agreed that it's really convenient to have a co-worker.  (This presumes that one gets along with one's co-workers.  We're not living in a Dilbert cartoon, thankfully.)

I know you're interested, if you are a homeschooler, so I'll explain the problem and our solution.  Some time ago, we wanted to start nudging the oldest kids (at the time, 9, 9, 11 years old) towards independently reading and discussing their World History lessons (we use the Story of the World textbook, though not the activity guide).  

I wrote in May about our first attempt:

Today I tried a new thing:  I delegated.

"Today you will each have a job," I informed them.  They looked at each other and made faces.

"The first person will be the Reader.  Can you guess what the Reader's job will be?"

"Um, to read the book?" "I want to be the first Reader!"  "No, me!"

"The Reader's job is to read the book, slowly and clearly, so that everyone can hear.   And if someone asks, 'What did you say?' the Reader has to repeat it."

"Is the other person the Writer?"

"Wait, I'm getting to that part.  The second person is called the Story-Hearer.  That person's job is --"

"To listen?"

"The Story-Hearer's job is to pay close attention to the events that happen in the story, and remember what happened in what order.  The Story-Hearer should be able to tell the story back at the end."

"Do they have to write down what they hear?"

"No, just listen.  The third job --"

"I know, the third person's job is the Go Get A Glass of Water And A Snack-er!"

"The third job is the Important-Thing-Noticer.  The Noticer --"

"Has to notice important things?"

"Important details.  Like the names of people and countries.  Dates.  Lists."

"Do they write it down?"

  "Uh, maybe.  We're going to try it a couple of different ways first."

This worked okay, but never very smoothly.  The distinctions between the Story-Hearer and the Important-Thing-Noticer were a bit muddied, and they would sometimes argue about whose fault it was that something was missed.  The Important-Thing-Noticer would interrupt the Reader to ask how to spell a name, and that  would slow everyone down.  And crucially, when we asked them afterwards to summarize the chapter, we learned that they had often not identified the same "important details" that Hannah and I would have identified... something like, they would remember Kaiser Friedrich and not Kaiser Wilhelm.

Hannah and I realized we had been taking too many things for granted.  When we adults read a historical passage, we apply all our skills honed over years in high school, college, and much postgraduate reading.  Not only that, but we already have in place filters that help us recognize "which people are important."  We know Kaiser Wilhelm is important because we have seen that name before.  And we also recognize style cues the writer puts in the story.  The kids don't know how to do that yet.  We have to teach them how to do that.

At first we thought we might look for a "study skills" curriculum, one that would teach specific skills of summarizing and skimming and note-taking.  I pulled down a large homeschooling supply catalog and flipped through it.  But after reading the reviews, we suspected that most of these curricula were readers supplying texts to practice on, rather than content telling how to read for information.  

We realized we needed to ask ourselves some questions.

How do WE do it?  How do we read for information?  How do we know which details are important and which can be left out of a summary?

I asked Hannah to think how she would read a chapter in SOTW about something she was unfamiliar with.  Next week's lesson is to be on Japan's Meiji Restoration, so that would do.  She slowly paged through the section, and spoke carefully about her thoughts.   We think there are two ways we identify "important details:"

  ---- First, by applying facts we already know from our previous education.  When we see a name we recognize from, say, college history classes, we think "Aha!  That is a Historical Figure!" and we take note of it.  When we see anything happening in, say, Europe between 1914 and 1918, we think "Aha!  This is probably related to World War I in some way!" and we take note of it.  

---- Second, by recognizing certain patterns of narrative that appear in history books.  Such-and-such a leader made a series of reforms, and the reforms are numbered 1, 2, 3, ... and the reforms had such-and-such a result.  This group gained power and that group lost power, and here are 1, 2, 3 ways it happened.  The population suffered this, that, and the other problem caused by bad government and so they revolted .  You see.  We recognize the pattern, and then we know that the Important Things are the facts in the story that fit the pattern.  (It's a simplified model, but we're dealing with a simplified history here, too.)

Can we expect children of ages 10, 10, and 12 to be able to do it the same way we do?

 ---- We definitely can't expect them to recognize very much in the way of facts, figures, names, and dates.  They have picked up some of this, of course, but most of the details they are seeing for the first time.  

---- We can't expect them to recognize the narrative patterns very quickly.  But maybe if we tell them the patterns ("In this story, a leader made three reforms, and something happened as a result"), they will be able to pick out the details ("As you read, write down the leader's name, a list of three reforms, and the result").  And perhaps over time, we can teach them to recognize the patterns.

What, exactly, are we wanting them to be able to do?  Can we clearly articulate that to ourselves?

---- We want them to read the chapter through once, understanding the story. 

---- Then we want them to read the chapter again, writing down the Important Things.  After some discussion, we unhappily concluded that, by "Important Things," we mean neither more nor less than "the things that WE think are the important things."  Perhaps we can work on that one.

---- Then we want them to put the notes away till the next day, and then, to be able to use the notes (and not the original text) to write a summary paragraph or to answer questions about the story.

That should do it.

So how to proceed?   We decided we'd continue dividing up the jobs of Reader, Story-Hearer, and Important-Thing-Noticer, with two crucial differences:

-- The kids would read the same text twice, with a different Reader each time.

-- The first time through, both other children would "be Story-hearers."  The second time through, both other children would "be Thing-Noticers."

Happily, by dividing up the jobs previously, we have already taught them how to be Reader, Story-hearer, and Thing-Noticer.

In between the two readings, we'll supply them with a Pattern that the chapter follows.  There's always a background section, and there's always a concluding sentence or two, and we'll tell them where those begin and end.  We'll give them the road signs to watch for in the middle part:  "In this chapter, one group was struggling for power with another group, and they each try several different things to gain power."  Then we'll tell them that, as they read through the second time, we want them to do these three things:

 - write a sentence to summarize the background section

 - write a list of facts that fit the pattern we gave them

 - write a sentence to summarize the conclusion.

I think this is worth a try.  Will let you know how it turns out.

Neither of us would ever have come up with this approach on our own.  Like I said:  it's nice to have co-workers.

Ambiguous negatives.

If you were interested in the comments two posts ago about lactational amenorrhea, perhaps you will also be interested in this  post at Betty Duffy which, I think, perfectly encapsulates many of the emotional and spiritual ambiguities around avoiding pregnancy even for a good reason.