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Lately, I've been overtaken by an odd sort of nostalgia, or maybe just an awareness of passing time: these kids I've got are getting bigger, and the clock keeps marching forward.

That's true, of course, but in a way the sense is detached from the reality of the now. A bus lumbers through the intersection in front of me, bearing an advertisement for a local urgent-care clinic, with a photo of a smiling eight- or nine-year-old boy, his hair mussed from having just taken off his hockey helmet. And I think: Ah, those were the days! But that's ridiculous, because I actually have an eight-or-nine-year-old boy, not a hockey-playing one (Deus avertat) and two younger ones coming up behind him, and I am only 38 and Still Have It, at least in the way that "It" matters for the purpose of this question, and for all I know there may be more.

Is it that my oldest is nearing thirteen? That I have lost the innocence of the mother-of-littles-only, and passed through that stage where your parenting theories are all still shiny, new, free of scuffs and dings? But I am thankful for that gift of experience, of wearing down the edges and corners of myself.

Maybe it's the slouching onward from being the young mother (not that I was ever super-young -- I had my first at twenty-five) to being the lady with all the kids (not that four is really all that many).

Part of it I think I know.

I am about nine years in, homeschooling, and just in the last couple of years I've felt myself hitting my stride. My third child is in first grade and so now I am doing some curricula for the third time, but I'm still tweaking and innovating and discovering the differences that different children bring to the schoolroom, and that they're really all getting individualized educations. I've got a great co-schooling routine twice a week; at the same time that I'm working on lengthy translations with the teens, I'm now back to amo, amas, amat with a batch of young elementary-school children, and am midway through my second trip through American history. And on the other side of co-schooling, I'm at peace with letting go of the control and allowing someone else to teach my children entire subjects. I've recently had to rough out plans for a high school curriculum so that I could get eighth grade squared away, and it looks do-able, not overwhelming.

All this happened slowly and with a great deal of focused work. Everyone who tackles the task of managing her own children's education brings something different to the work -- we are all entrepreneurs, free agents, distributed, running on our own operating systems. I brought an intense preference for tweaking curricula to suit my vision, for careful scheduling so there would never be a question of "what should we do today?" I brought a need to figure things out in writing, a thrill at learning while leading kids through subjects I don't have a strong background in (why would I want to teach French? I already know it), and a penchant for flow when I stay up at night, fueled by coffee, books splayed out on every surface, working out which passage to read when, and which concept needs more coverage to balance the other concept.

I do not have a penchant for flow when actually teaching children, except maybe when I get to sit next to just one child and teach math. I have some hopes to catch a little bit of it when I teach high school-level geometry next year.

Anyway -- who else out there is nine years into their career? After nine years, we should all be hitting our stride, getting better and better at the thing we do, and each thing we do prepares us better for the tasks ahead, right? Having invested so much time and training and experience in ourselves, we are specialists, confident, experts.

This is clearly, by now, the thing that I do. And I survey my younger children -- my daughter's got eleven years of education yet, and my youngest son hasn't started yet, I suppose there are fourteen or fifteen years ahead for him --

-- and don't forget that I Still Have It --

-- and, while the future may bring many things and I could make a different path at any time if necessary, it's apparent that this, this up-at-night-with-the-history-spreadsheet, this sitting-down-with-the-pattern-blocks, this hey-you-put-that-iPod-down-and-come-write-your-journal-entry, this will go on being the thing that I do.

And I am okay with it. I really am. I enjoy it. It is truly challenging, in the best way that an occupation can be challenging. I am one of those people who never stops moving -- that can be a character flaw, and is for me sometimes -- but one thing about that, it suits this thing I do very well.

But occasionally I find myself astonished by what I have done, and by what I plan to do.

I am living in a life that once seemed too improbable to even give voice to desiring. And I have tossed myself in, senselessly. And it's exhilarating, and difficult, and way more messy than I can stand, honestly.

And I have slowly realized that nine years of specialization helps, but that it doesn't guarantee that I will be an expert in whatever happens in the future. And eventually, no matter how expert I am at teaching my small children, biology will say to me, "You're fired."

Nothing in this life looks like an advertisement, that's for sure.

The astonishment is that (a) this situation is permanent, and (b) that it never stops evolving. Though I may have many years left of it, I now know from experience that nothing in it can be held firmly, it is always slipping away, and that is what makes it so very, very important, every minute of it, present, now.

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At your service.

A video detailing something I've never heard of that made my jaw drop.  The Atlantic Monthly headlined their short piece on it, "How 4,000 Men Hand-Deliver 175,000 Lunches Around Mumbai in One Day:"

Dabbawalla from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

“Dabbawalla” comes from the term "tiffin dabba," referring to a tiered lunch box and “walla,” a carrier or vendor. As Saritha Rai explains in The New York Times, India’s dabbawalla network originated during the British colonial occupation after cities were flooded with new, regional workers as a way to bridge the distance [both literally and figuratively] between their work sites and their homes. Each morning, after the recipient has gone to work, family members who remain at home (mothers, wives, grandmothers, and sisters) prepare a freshly-cooked meal to be picked up by a dabbawalla, sorted and distributed at railway stations, and hand-delivered to their loved one at the office.

Today, Mumbai is home to approximately 4,000 dabbawallas who deliver tens of thousands of lunches via an intricate, 125-year-old coding system without fail. 

The NYT article is here.

 

Habemus papam.

Yesterday was an interesting day in the homeschool, I'll tell you that.  The kids were on after-lunch break and I had just settled down to work like mad on some planning for history lessons when I heard a roar from a crowd a quarter of the way around the world.  I looked up to see the chimney in the video feed in the corner of my screen belching smoke.  I called for the children and they came rushing down.   

At one point they were singing "We just got a pope" to the tune of the Blue's Clues "we just got a letter" song.

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I had Facebook, Twitter, and IM going all at once -- oh, that was so much fun, all the tweeting and status-updating back and forth.  Cracking stupid jokes about whether the conclave was peanut-free  and #conclaveseagull and #reasonsthepopeislate (my favorite: he has to go through that really big packet from HR.)

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I was watching the vatican.va feed yesterday when Pope Francis came out for the first time, and so I watched the first speech in Italian, with no commentary whatsoever.  

"Fratelli e sorelli -- buona sera..."

"Brothers and sisters -- good evening!" I whispered to the kids.  After French, Latin, and Spanish, I can get that much.  I also caught (mostly) the joke about the bishops going to the ends of the earth for their cardinal.  We figured out pretty quickly what they were up to with the prayers and joined in in English.

Here's what I watched, and Vatican Radio's translation follows:

Brothers and sisters, good evening.

You all know that the duty of the Conclave was to give a bishop to Rome. It seems that my brother Cardinals have come almost to the ends of the Earth to get him ... but here we are. I thank you for the welcome that has come from the diocesan community of Rome.

First of all, I would say a prayer: Pray for our Bishop Emeritus Benedict XVI ... Let us all pray together for him, that the Lord bless him and Our Lady protect him.

Our Father ...Hail Mary ...Glory to the Father ...

And now let us begin this journey, the Bishop and people, this journey of the Church of Rome, which presides in charity over all the Churches, a journey of brotherhood in love, of mutual trust. Let us always pray for one another. Let us pray for the whole world that there might be a great sense of brotherhood. My hope is that this journey of the Church that we begin today, together with help of my Cardinal Vicar, be fruitful for the evangelization of this beautiful city.

And now I would like to give the blessing, but first I want to ask you a favor. Before the bishop blesses the people, I ask that you would pray to the Lord to bless me — the prayer of the people for their Bishop. Let us say this prayer — your prayer for me — in silence. 

There was more -- the blessing Urbi et Orbi -- but the video I have stops there, alas.

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That weird little smile.  He looks downright bemused, doesn't he?  Like the pope hat doesn't fit quite right.  This went around yesterday:

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This is my favorite cellphone video from the crowd:

I love the news going through the crowd:  "Argentina!" (Italian accent) followed by "Argentina?! A South American!" in an obviously North American accent followed by "Ar-hen-tin-a!" by the exuberant and apparently Spanish-speaking man behind the videographer.

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We don't know a whole lot about this man yet, but I'm sure some details will come out in the next few days.

 At the moment, I would just like to point out that horror is emanating from all the right places.  

And no, I don't just mean the let's-have-women-priests-and-contraception bunch.  A friend of mine messaged me yesterday to point out that the uber-traditionalists are also horrified at the new pope's ecumenism, at the S.J. after his name, and a number of other things. 

Any pope that has the uber-progressives AND the uber-traditionalists foaming at the mouth, and -- what's more important -- the journalists confused, is probably not so bad.

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We don't know very much yet.  But I know this:  the Spirit is in charge, and we can trust a Spirit that managed to get us through the Borgia popes.  I think He can handle an elderly Argentinian soccer fan for a little while.

Window open on the chimney.

I hope they elect a pope soon, or I'm not going to get ANYTHING done this week during after-lunch recess.

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Yesterday was pretty cool -- watching the cardinals take the oath of secrecy in Latin. 

You got to hear all their native accents.

New York City Cardinal Dolan sounded like, "Yo Adrienne, ego Timothy Cardinalis Dolan. Spondeo, volveo, et juro."  

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We complained a lot, like the children of Israel in the desert, about the lack of "meat" on the live video feed.  Chimney chimney chimney boring.  

So God sent us quail.  I mean, seagull.

Hello, birdie.

Oh wait, it's gone now.

Back to the chimney.  

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I don't have a dog in the who's-going-to-be-pope fight, actually, although I kind of hope they continue to steer clear of Italian cardinals for the next couple of hundred years.  And French cardinals, too.  Those guys are trouble.

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Secretly, though, I would like the new pope-name to be Leo.  That would make things kind of exciting around here.  We might have to have cake.

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UPDATE.  White!

Seriously.  I have to close this window and get back to work.

 

Praestet fides supplementum/Sensuum defectui.

I've been humming Tantum Ergo all weekend, ever since the choir sang Tantum Ergo at Benediction on Friday night, up in the church after the fish fry and before the Stations.  Since I started learning Latin several years ago, it's one of the few Latin hymns that I've bothered to puzzle out with a dictionary and grammar, and I'm very fond of it. 

Tantum ergo sacramentum

veneremur cernui;

et antiquum documentum

novo cedat ritui;

praestet fides supplementum 

Sensuum defectui.

 

The last bit is often translated (so that it will scan), "For the failing of the senses, faith must serve to compensate," but even with my cruddy Latin-English dictionary I can catch glimpses of a more precise meaning:  praestare (the "to serve" in the translation) means as a transitive verb "to become surety for, to be responsible for" and has connotations of excellence in its intransitive form; defectus -us is "a failing, disappearing, especially a failing of light, eclipse."  

So it's maybe something more like: just in the measure that our senses fail, let faith fill up the gap between what we have and what we need.  

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Elizabeth Scalia, on Twitter, linked to a page that featured an devious optical illusion:

I've seen illusions like this before, and am familiar with the explanations for them, but I never cease to marvel at them.  In this case, the "blue" and "green" spirals are exactly the same color.  

You could, perhaps, just trust me.

Or...

You can go over to the page and read there the explanation and see the evidence.  You will be easily convinced.   You'll know that there isn't a blue spiral and a green spiral; there are only spirals of a single bluish-green color.  

And then you can come back here, where I have left off the explanation and the proof, and contemplate the image again.  "I now know that the blue and the green spirals are the same color," you can tell yourself.  

You will not see it any different.  You will see the blue color and the green color.  To go on believing the colors are the same color, you will have to defy your eyes.  You will do it anyway, because you remember that some time ago (it was only a moment; but what if you come back to this page in a year, or five years?) you were satisfactorily convinced.

The process by which you carry your conviction from the past, where reason led you to a certain conclusion, into the present, where senses contradict your reasoned certitude -- that process goes by the name "faith."

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You know, there are many things in the study of the natural world, or sometimes in mathematics, which go against intuition.  Our experience takes shape in a world of friction, gravity, and air resistance; when for the first time one sees the feather and the stone strike the floor of the vacuum chamber, it's a shock.  After you file out of the demonstration lab, All objects accelerate at the same rate in a gravitational field becomes an article of faith, because how often do we put feathers and stones in vacuum chambers in daily life?  Days go by, years, in which all falling feathers waft gently downwards and all stones drop like stones.   

But we know better, only because of a determination:  to "remember not to forget" that the whole picture is more complicated than it looks at first glance.

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"In the story, the frog was really a prince, wasn't he?"

"Yes," said Cecilia, "rather a good sort of prince.  He fetched the princess's ball out of the fountain when she dropped it in."

"And if she touched him, he felt like a frog?  And if she looked at him he looked like a frog.  And if she heard him, it was a frog's croak she heard?  That's three senses -- sight, hearing, and touch, and none of them could have told her he was really a prince, could they?  And if she had smelt or tasted him (which I'm sure she didn't!) those two senses wouldn't have told her any more, would they?"

"What are senses, exactly?" said Michael.

"The five ways you have of finding out about things," said St. Patrick, "...If you think of it, you will see that those are the only ways we have of knowing anything about the world around us."

Cecilia and Michael both thought about it solemnly for a moment and then admitted that those were the only ways you could know about things.

"...I'll tell you something about them that not everybody knows.  None of them will tell you what a thing is, only what it looks like, sounds like, feels like, and so on.  And as a rule you know quite well what it is by means of those things.  But it is quite easy to make a mistake now and then."

--from St. Patrick's Summer:  A Children's Adventure Catechism by Marigold Hunt

"What is the Eucharist?"

I figured I might as well share some of what I have been writing over at Electingthepope.net, Dorian Speed's big conclave-Q-and-A project.  

Last week I managed to snag the question "What is the Eucharist?"  I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer the question, but I had a definite idea how I wanted to go about answering it for Dorian's audience.

Come to think of it, Dorian hasn't actually told me who the audience is, except that it has to include non-Catholics, sixth-graders, and journalists. 

Here's what I wrote.  

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In Catholic practice and belief, the Eucharist — also called “Holy Communion” — is the highest form of worship, and has been from the earliest time of the Church to today.   Lumen Gentium, a document of Vatican II, calls it the “fount and apex of the Christian life.”  The “Liturgy of the Eucharist” takes up the latter half of every Catholic Mass throughout the world.

So what is it?  Why is it so important?

Let’s begin with Scripture, with one of the best-attested  and earliest-written passages in the New Testament.

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St. Paul, leader of the first generation of Christians, says in the First Letter to the Corinthians:

…I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, 

that the Lord Jesus,

on the night he was handed over,
took bread,

and, after he had given thanks,

broke it and said,

“This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

In the same way also the cup, after supper,

saying,

“This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.

The story is also told in three of the four Gospels.  Likely the earliest is St. Mark’s account:

While they were eating,

he took bread,

said the blessing,

broke it, and gave it to them, and said,

“Take it; this is my body.”  

Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them,

and they all drank from it.  

He said to them,

“This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many…”

The “direct quotes” of Jesus Christ in these Bible passages are taken literally by Catholics, though we do not claim to understand exactly how it all works.

Here is what we do understand.  At the Last Supper (“on the night he was handed over,”) Jesus took the unleavened Passover bread and told his friends “This is my body.”   He took the Passover wine, in a chalice, and said to them “This is my blood,” and/or “This is the new covenant in my blood,” before giving it to them to share.

We take this man, who healed the sick and raised the dead with a word, at his word:

• When he gave to them to eat that stuff that looked and tasted like bread, it was — really was — his Body.
• When he handed them the chalice, redolent with wine’s fragrance, the contents of that cup were — really were — his Blood.

We hear this man, who made Peter to walk to him on the water with a command, and trust that we can obey his command:

• If he tells the Church, “Do this in remembrance of me,” then the Church can and must “do this.”  

And so the Church has, and does.  In the Liturgy of the Eucharist, a priest (acting in the place of Christ, as we understand Christ was asking his apostles to do) takes bread, blesses it, and quotes Jesus’s words “This is My Body.” He takes wine, blesses it, and quotes Jesus’s words that declare it is His Blood.  We believe that by commanding this, Jesus has made it — somehow — so it can be so, and is.

We believe that in every Eucharist the Church does what Jesus was doing — or rather, that Jesus does it, through the actions of the priest who does as Jesus commands.  From the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 1410):

It is Christ himself, the eternal high priest of the New Covenant who, acting through the ministry of the priests, offers the Eucharistic sacrifice. And it is the same Christ, really present under the species of bread and wine, who is the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice. 

Each Eucharist isn’t a repeating of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, nor is it a new sacrifice every time.  Rather, it’s one and the same “Holy Sacrifice,” because (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1330)

it makes present the one sacrifice of Christ the Savior and includes the Church’s offering.

Our “offering” is ourselves, as well as the material gifts we’ve brought with us to help support the Church, and the bread and wine that our support helps provide; we offer all that as part of the Eucharistic liturgy at Mass.

Jesus was anticipating the cross when he instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper; we are memorializing it when we participate in the Eucharist at Mass.  From the Catechism, paragraph 1323:

This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved Spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet ‘in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.’”

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“The Eucharist,” also called “The Blessed Sacrament,” is that blessed stuff.  It appears to the senses exactly like simple unleavened bread and like wine in a cup, not very different from its appearance before the Eucharistic blessing.  But we don’t call it “bread” and “wine” anymore, unless we’re careless with our language, because we believe that on a level that’s more real than things we can touch and see, it’s not bread and wine any longer.

(If in writing and speaking we want to refer to the stuff-that-looks-like-bread-but-isn’t, you may hear us call it the “Host.”  If we have to refer to the stuff-that-looks-like-wine-but-isn’t, we call it the “Precious Blood” or else we may say “the chalice” or “the cup.”)

When we receive Communion, we receive the Eucharist:  we are given some of the Host or some of the Precious Blood or both (depending on local practice and circumstances), and we consume it, believing that in doing so we are — really — eating and drinking the Body and Blood of the Lord, for the simple reason that He commanded us to.

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The Eucharist is usually reserved after Mass, in the form of leftover blessed Hosts, in a special closed container in the Church called a tabernacle.  Between Masses, it is fitting to pray and reflect before the tabernacle, and to direct our prayers to the Lord, because we believe He is really there.   At some times, a blessed Host is placed in a special display stand, called a “monstrance” (from a Latin word meaning “to show”) which allows it to be seen and adored by the faithful:  this practice is called Eucharistic Adoration.

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To read more about the Eucharist, see the article “The Sacrament of the Eucharist,” part of a section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that explains the celebration of the seven sacraments.

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Would you have added anything?

Accepting apology.

I take my three-year-old to a birth-through-age-five, music-and-movement class that meets once a week in my neighborhood.  Our family's been doing the classes since my first was a toddler and my second a newborn, so -- nearly ten years!   

In those years we've seen many other families come and go.  A mother arrives with a toddler and a newborn; and a year or two later the older one disappears into the school system; and a year or two later the family is done with music class.  But we're still going.  I usually have one or two of the older ones with me, too; they stay in the anteroom and work on math or read books while I'm in the studio with the 3yo and the other children, singing and waving scarves.

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This quarter the class is fuller than usual -- due to a combination of babies being born during the course of the session, and a computer glitch that accidentally allowed too many families to sign up.  And it can get boisterous in there.   The instructor is very easygoing about the children getting up and moving around the room, as long as they're not running with claves, and I'm pretty used to that.  It is a music-and-movement class, after all.  

Today, however, in the middle of a song, a frustrated mother from across the room got up, walked over to me, and said:  "Can you please keep your son from running around the room?  All the other children are following him!"  (Including, I assume, her own two-year-old daughter.)

I was caught off guard because it's pretty usual for the children to be running around the room -- but I immediately saw three things:  (1) She was new, (2) there are more children than usual and so running around might actually be a problem in this particular class, (3) I was sitting right next to the instructor -- and I knew that I could trust the instructor to talk to us separately if there was a problem.  So I apologized to her, and then I grabbed my 3yo as he trotted by and pulled him into my lap for a Tickle of Redirection.

While I had him in my lap I whispered to him, "See that mommy over there?  She got worried because you were running around the room and her little girl wanted to do what you are doing.  It's okay to run, but can you help her forgive us?  Can you go apologize to her?"

I admit that part of me, feeling stung, wanted to show off my good-mothering skills.  As I've written before, the disciplinarian in me is pretty smug about having mastered the art of teaching kids to apologize.

"Okay, mama," he said, and a song or two later he danced over and said -- not actually to the correct mommy, but I think perhaps she heard him anyway -- "I'm sorry I was running, will you forgive me?"

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Part of me was a little indignant about this whole thing because it isn't, after all, against the rules for the small children to run and dance around the room in this class.  (Just as I was leaving the studio I caught sight of the instructor starting a conversation with the worrying mother, but I didn't stick around to eavesdrop.)  And I started to be indignant on behalf of my three-year-old.  Maybe I shouldn't have sent him to apologize.  Why should he feel ashamed or bad just because she didn't like the way he was playing?

And then I realized that he did not give any sign whatsoever of having felt ashamed or bad.  He had danced right over there, eagerly, and recited the words he has learned.

Apologies in our household are so common, so routine, and so ritualized that for most of us they don't have any connotation of humiliation.*  

I don't punish kids by making them apologize.  

I tell them that we do it to help the other person forgive them, and it doesn't matter whose fault something was or whether the other person was wrong; the point is to smooth the way to forgiveness, something we always should desire from anyone who is unhappy with our behavior -- justified or not.

It was a nice reminder, seeing my three-year-old cheerfully dancing around the room afterwards, free, and I felt my own indignation at "having been made to apologize" evaporating as I contemplated him.

I think there'd be a lot fewer "fake apologies" and "apology-non-apologies" in the world if we all understood that there's nothing inherently humiliating or false about apologies -- if we understood that the point of apology is nothing more than a desire for forgiveness -- for the sake of someone else who needs to forgive -- put into words and actions.  It's not necessarily or only a way of saying "I was wrong and I need your forgiveness."  It can also be a way of saying "You need to forgive me, and I want what's good for you."

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*I do have one child, age nine,  who finds it hard to summon the words "I'm sorry," even with a script.  He turns a little red and smiles nervously.  I think it's more performance anxiety than anything.  I find I need to take a little more care with him, so that he doesn't interpret the act of apologizing as a humiliating punishment -- but I still think that the practice is good for him, and that the repetition will make it easier eventually.

Imitation in the face of the little things.

• Jamie wrote the other day, thinking of her terminally ill brother-in-law who passed away shortly thereafter:

It is shocking to me that someone I was joking around with in January will not see the end of March. It is a bracing reality: when I find myself wringing my hands about -- I don't know, the kids' failure to put their laundry away or my students' failure to prepare for an exam, I have to pull myself up short. Is my husband expected to die in the next few days? Time to shut my mouth and offer up my little (teeny, minuscule, absurdly small) sufferings for their family.

I've been carrying The Imitation of Christ around in my bag for Lent. Yesterday I came upon a passage that made me think again about those small crosses -- the ones that we still can choose to bear or not to bear, if we are comfortable, healthy and generally at peace.

They don't seem like much, compared to what some have, but they are what we have.

From Chapter 20 of Book 3, some words about "trivial" sufferings and "slight" temptations.

Lord, I will acknowledge my sin before you and confess my instability. Often some trivial thing depresses me, leaving me dull and slow to do good works. I resolve to stand firm; but at the slightest temptation, I am set back.

Sometimes from a mere trifle a grievous temptation arises; and just when I feel sure and think I have the upper hand, suddenly I am almost overcome by the least thing.

...But this is what disturbs me ... that I am so prone to fall and so weak in resisting my passions... And [even when] I do not give in to them altogether, yet their assaults are troublesome to me, so that I am wearied by the daily conflict.

Thomas á Kempis adds to this prayer an acknowledgement that the conflict helps us see our infirmities more clearly, and a prayer for God's strength in resisting these "trifles."

Note : He does not say, "God, forgive me because I ought to be able to resist them all by myself."

The chapter goes on to speak of what sounds like much less trifling, much more terrible sufferings:

...And what kind of life this is, where troubles and miseries are never wanting and everywhere there lurk snares and enemies! For as soon as one temptation or trouble goes away, another comes; and while the first struggle is still on, many others suddenly rise up unexpectedly.

How, then, can this life be loved, which is so full of bitterness and subject to so many trials? How can it even be called life, since it brings forth so many deaths and spiritual plagues? Yet it is loved and many seek all their pleasure in it...

...A little pleasure dominates the minds of the worldly.

But especially today, it isn't hard to figure out why a little pleasure dominates our minds... Few of us suffer constant "miseries" anymore. We can go weeks, months, years, with hardly a serious suffering to glance at.

(Although they can rise up and throttle us sometimes, seemingly out of the blue.)

Maybe what we need are smaller words for smaller sufferings. Then the passage might go something like this:

Often some petty thing depresses me, leaving me dull and slow to do all the things I should be doing.

Sometimes I get an awfully strong craving to have something that isn't even very good... and just when I think I have successfully put the craving out of my mind, I totally lose it. And even when I DO resist, it makes me crabby because it's so hard.

And you know what? It never stops. There is always some little thing that annoys me or irritates me, no matter where I am, and I am always ready to snap at some person, or lash out in anger, or even hurt myself by giving in to something I said I wouldn't do.

That is, as the book says, life.

We moderns, I think, see no contradiction or surprise in that such troubles coexist with pleasures. It seems to make no sense to Thomas á Kempis, but it makes sense to us -- the reason we run after pleasures is in part to deaden us against the annoying, no-fun parts. Heck, the pleasures wouldn't even be so bad, except that we end up using them in that way -- as an escape from people and things that bug us, irritate us, get on our nerves, give us sinking feelings in the pits of our stomachs, or make us flush with humiliation.

Skipping back to chapter 12 of the same book:

DISCIPLE: O my Lord, God, I can see that patience is very necessary for me, for this life is full of many disturbing things. No matter how I may plan my life so as to have peace, life cannot be without struggle and sorrow.

CHRIST: ...This is true. It is not My will that you look for peace without temptations or difficulties; on the contrary, you must believe that you have found peace when you have been tried by... adversity...Try to bear the evils of this life patiently...

...Do you think that worldly persons suffer little or nothing? You will find this is not so, even among the most privileged.

I think Thomas has let his hand show a bit: he is writing to an audience who thinks they suffer a LOT. This is kind of a giveaway that maybe I do not have the right disposition to be reading this book.

Can't disagree with it, though. Here is a report from the too-worldly, aware-of-my-vast-privilege point of view: Yeah, I still complain a lot. Isn't that what I started out writing about? That we still get led astray by things that bug us even when we really have nothing terrible going on?

But perhaps you will say that others have many pleasures and follow their own will so much that they count their adversities as small.

There is a faint, troubling implication here: beware if you count your adversities as small. It could be because you find so much comfort in God. But it could also be because you "follow your own will so much."

The more you withdraw from creature comforts, the sweeter and more lasting will be the comfort you find in Me. But in the beginning you will not attain to these without struggle and labor; for your old habits will stand in the way, but better ones will overcome them...

Our ancient enemy, the devil, will tempt you and hinder you, if he can, but devout prayer will drive him away; and by useful employment, his way will be blocked and he will not dare to come near you.

I am pretty sure I have heard this prescription -- which amounts to "Ora et labora" -- before.

Most of the advice in The Imitation, it seems, amounts to "Learn patience." I wonder if this is, really, all that it takes -- at least, in the imitation of Christ. And it makes me wonder: If we are so blind to our little crosses that it doesn't seem worth the trouble to carry them, how privileged can we really be?

 

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Brief request.

Frequent commenter Jamie of Light and Momentary is begging your prayers:  here, here, and here.

My husband has three sisters. The middle sister ... and her husband agreed to be our children's guardians in the event of disaster.... Now they have one little girl who will be 2 in July and another who turned 1 earlier this month.

Her husband was just diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. It's stage IV...

She is asking for prayers:

• first, for miraculous healing; 
• second, for strength (both physical and emotional); 
• third, for a peaceful transition as they ease their younger daughter out of their bed and into a crib.

 ...Initially they told him he might have a year, but it is looking more like a matter of days until the end. 

The third intention, in its everyday disguise, almost undid me.  Please offer what you can.

Where have I been?

Where have I been, you ask? I've been spending my blogging energy on Dorian Speed's co-blogging project, the Q&A site Electingthepope.net . (Dorian frequently comments here and also blogs at Scrutinies.)

I know, I already mentioned this. Well, I'm just trying to explain my absence.

It's been pretty fun, actually. All the bloggers in the stable started out making the questions ourselves, and then questions started to come in from the public. The questions start out being labeled "Up for Grabs" and then, well, we can grab them. For me, it feels like a mix of two experiences:

• "Oo! I want that question! Let me snag it before anyone else does!"
• "Hm -- That one's been sitting there for a while. Must be that no one else wants it. Well, I'll take a stab at it."

In a recent local news article, Dorian described her writers (here we all are) as "lay experts." I thought that was funny. "Extremely nerdy Catholics" probably wouldn't have played very well, I guess.

So far, I have had the most fun researching and writing the answer to a question that was originally phrased something along the lines of "Doesn't it look hypocritical that Cardinal Mahony is coming? Can't the other cardinals keep him out of the conclave?" That turned out to be very interesting as it forced me to dig into canon law as well as the election rules. I guess you could say that it would be hypocritical for the electors to refuse to follow the rules, under which all the cardinals -- no matter their public reputations -- are required to participate in the election on pain of holy obedience.

(No, I don't know if that means that Cardinal Keith O'Brien of Scotland, former archbishop of Edinburgh who announced he's not coming, is being disobedient. For all we know he got a dispensation from the former Holy Father along with his resignation from the archbishopric. Pesky thing about matters of conscience is that they're so often invisible to those whose business it isn't.)

The other day I noticed that "What is the Eucharist?" was up for grabs. I thought for sure someone would pick it up, and initially thought that one was too big a job for me, but then the next morning I woke up knowing exactly how I was going to write it for a wide, potentially non-Catholic audience. It was still up for grabs so I grabbed it. I told Dorian she has to get another blogger to vet it before publishing, but I hope to see it up soon.

Ok, off to First Saturday Mass. See you later.

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