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"You, Reading This, Be Ready" by William Stafford.

William Stafford is a poet who is new to me, but he was incredibly prolific, despite beginning his career late:  at 48 (I turn 48 this year!) he published his first major collection of poetry.

Why not this poem, this pseudo-sonnet, for the first Friday in Lent?

You, Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now?  Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life—

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

.                                                                    — William Stafford

 

 

Bubbling.

Yesterday, after six long months apart, we finally rejoined H. and her kids for co-schooling at my house.

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We had plenty of time over the summer to figure out what we were going to do.   Back when winter was yielding to spring, our little school gatherings (being more than ten people) were outright prohibited.   We slowed down, met with each others' kids over the phone and over Discord, stretched the end of last year into midsummer.    We thought about meeting outdoors, masked and distanced, but knew there was no way we could keep enough control over the six-year-olds for that to work.   Even after small gatherings were no longer outright prohibited, we stayed cautiously away.  There were visits to elderly relatives expected; there were sons visiting from college; we thought it best not to mix our family's risks, all summer long.

H. and I met a few times, outdoors and masked.  We took a long walk and hashed out our plans.  From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, we figured, there would be no visits to grandparents; there would be little or nothing in the way of social events; the young men in college hope to be staying away.   Our partners work similar jobs that expose them occasionally to the corporate workplace, but nothing more.  Neither family is attending religious services.  One teenager has a convenience-store job, so there's that; but otherwise, our risk profiles---between Labor Day and Thanksgiving---are similar.  And so we decided to merge bubbles, from Labor Day to Thanksgiving (as long as no one appears sick or learns of exposure).  And start co-schooling again:  three first-graders, one fifth-grader, one ninth-grader, one tenth-grader.

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You should have seen the shrieks and hugs when the little friends saw each other for the first time, the reunion on my front steps.  The bigger people tiptoed sheepishly around each other, flinching. 

Can it really be okay to step into your house? 

Can it really be okay to stand close enough to hand you a cup of coffee?  

Well, we cannot be sure it is okay, but we have tried to increase the odds as much as we can.  We have pulled back everywhere else. And it is a blessed relief to know that---now that we've let the hammer fall---we might as well let the children wrestle, we might as well eat lunch together at the same small table, we might as well pass the cucumbers and butter the children's bread for them, we might as well sit close together and sing out amem, ames, amet.  

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Once we got settled into teaching, we both felt more comfortable, and we made it through our whole day with time to spare, enough time to sit on my new socially distanced porch furniture---but all clustered together at one end--- and have a pot of tea and chat about how it had gone.   

And how had it gone?

Normal.  So much normal.  So much utterly craveable normal.  Just that.  So very valuable, an environment that we are used to, that we know how to teach the children in, that we know how to be together in.

And of course as we talked about the upcoming weekend there was the rush of delight when we realized that, in fact, we can get together this weekend.  Because, having made the leap, the marginal risk is now quite small.  And so maybe we will come over, bearing potluck dishes and wine, and let our children run around in the yard.  I don't know, we have to decide, but something can happen.  It is almost giddy.

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One of my children came into our bed weeping, Thursday night, because Thursday had been so wonderful that he couldn't bear to have a day that wasn't Thursday.  We soothed him:  Friday would be regular, just us in our house, but we would see them again soon.  And eventually he went to sleep. 

I lay there a bit longer in the dark after his sniffles had faded away, thinking that there was something of that in my own heart too, a bit of a scrap of loose end.  I decided (not to over-dramatize the pandemic) it is like when you come to the end of a post-apocalyptic novel, like Station Eleven or World War Z, and the author has decided to end the novel in the happiest way possible, by providing a little beam of hopeful evidence that things are going to get better.  It is nice to have a happy ending, and I much prefer my dystopias to have a bit of hope at the end.  But you know, those endings can never be much better than wistful.  There is a bit of hope and happiness, or hoped-for happiness, there.  But it's not the real happy ending you wished could be, the one where things go back to the way they were before.  There is still a long road ahead for the characters, a road that remains unseen now that the book is closed.  

And we have a long road ahead too, and we don't see it.  Still, the hope is real, and when the hopeful event is present, it isn't just hope but joy.  So.  We are going to enjoy it, each time we get a chance.  And in between, keep hoping.

 

Correction, and the damaged icon.

A Facebook friend posted this quote the other day, and I am basically blogging it now just so I can remember it.  

Unless we look at a person and see the beauty there is in this person, we can contribute nothing to him. One does not help a person by discerning what is wrong, what is ugly, what is distorted. Christ looked at everyone he met, at the prostitute, at the thief, and saw the beauty hidden there. Perhaps it was distorted, perhaps damaged, but it was beauty none the less, and what he did was to call out this beauty.

---attributed to Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh

The more I look at it, the more I am drawn to it as one of the great principles for governing our voices in the world--I mean, the principle has been around for quite a long time, it's just that this is a very concise and memorable way of putting it.

As I commented when I first saw it, "Good for remembering when someone is wrong on the internet."  But it is more than that, and I keep coming back.

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Who was Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh?  For years he served as archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland.   He published six books on prayer during his life.  Texts (in English) of numerous sermons are available at this link.  I haven't been able to confirm the quote or figure out which publication it comes from via internet-only searches yet.  This article suggests it might be tracked down in a book about him, This Holy Man by Gillian Crow.

I found other pieces sometimes connected to the quote that go as follows:

This is what we must learn to do with regard to others. But to do so we must first have a purity of heart, a purity of intention, an openness which is not always there - certainly not in me - so that we can listen, can look, and can see the beauty which is hidden. 

Every one of us is in the image of God, and every one of us is like a damaged icon. But if we were given an icon damaged by time, damaged by circumstances, or desecrated by human hatred, we would treat it with reverence, with tenderness, with broken-heartedness. We would not pay attention primarily to the fact that it is damaged, but to the tragedy of its being damaged. We would concentrate on what is left of its beauty, and not on what is lost of its beauty. And this is what we must learn to do with regard to each person as an individual...

...but also – and this is not always as easy – with regard to groups of people, whether it be a parish or a denomination, or a nation. We must learn to look, and look until we have seen the underlying beauty of this group of people. Only then can we even begin to do something to call out all the beauty that is there. Listen to other people, and whenever you discern something which sounds true, which is a revelation of harmony and beauty, emphasize it and help it to flower. Strengthen it and encourage it to live.

(versions of the quote here, here, here)

And a similar quote in this article suggests it might be tracked down via a biographical work, This Holy Man by Gillian Crow.  But that's as far as I got this morning.

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Unless we look at a person and see the beauty there is in this person, we can contribute nothing to him.  

I think a lot of us think that we are justified in criticizing, commenting, and correcting any other person as long as we are correct, or as long as whatever we want to say is important enough. 

But I think it is nearer the truth to accept that we can contribute nothing to a person whom we do not see as a real person, with good in him or her.  What we wish to say might be true.  What we wish to say might be eloquent or beautiful in and of itself.   But without a sense of the human-ness and the intrinsic goodness of the intended recipient, we cannot contribute it:  we can only transmit, or worse, inflict.  

The content of the message, alone, cannot justify every act of communicating it.  That is a type of ends-justify-the-means.   And even if it is a message we are bound to bear, we can only be bound to it in the sense that we are capable of it; and the idea here is that we are not, in fact, capable of "contributing" it to everybody.  And when that's so, the fault is often on the messenger's side. 

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I've heard it said that we should "look for opportunities" to speak the truth.  I guess the idea is to find people in moments when they are open to our message, and strike at the vulnerable moment.  It's better than not looking at the people at all, but even that falls a little flat.   Because when we look at a human being we should see a person for their own sake, not an opportunity to enact our desires or even our mission.    If I, specifically, cannot see the humanity particular person I'm thinking of addressing in a particular moment, "there is nothing I can contribute," and I should probably just shut up and find another conversation.

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But what about when we have a clear duty to correct falsehoods, imposed not by a specific relationship with a person spreading them, but imposed by the ethics inherent to our own position?  If we are scholars, or teachers, or journalists, or editors, or leaders in government, or have pastoral responsibilities?

Such individuals might be bound to correct---not people, exactly---but other people's bad messages.  And really, any of us might be in a position to be able to protect our friends and family, or the wider public, from objectively wrong messages.  Disinformation is a real problem today; friends and acquaintances may be spreading falsehoods, sometimes dangerous ones.   Besides disinformation, some expressions of "mere" opinions can also promote objective falsehoods, such as vile prejudices or broken visions of human dignity.

So sometimes we may rightly judge that we have a duty not to be silent, even if the person spreading misinformation, or vile prejudice, or whatever, is someone we can't bring ourselves to view in the moment as a human being possessing inherent beauty.

(Face it.  Even if we wholly subscribe to the notion of inherent dignity of all human beings:  Some human beings really test us.)

Even if it is very difficult to see the goodness and humanity of a given spreader-of-untruths, so that we cannot contribute anything to that person, I think it's possible to counter their misinformation.  The key is speaking to the other listeners, refuting the message, offering the better alternative. 

Maybe it's best to acknowledge, at least to ourselves, that we are unlikely to be able to reach the original poster.  We don't know them well enough; we can't see them well enough as human beings; possibly they won't see us, either; all we know is that, from our side, we can't contribute to them; we lack the grace to see them as fully as we should.

But there are other people listening, and we can address ourselves to them instead.  And in the meantime, we should be working on seeing the goodness of humanity in as many people as we can.

Nicodemus.

Saturday's Mass readings included the second of the three appearances that Nicodemus makes in the Gospel of John.    Nicodemus is a Pharisee, and a member of the Sanhedrin, presumably wealthy or at least with access to wealth, who does three rather surprising things:

• Visits Jesus by night, confesses "We know that you are a teacher who has come from God," and discusses Jesus's teachings with him, notably the bit about being "born again"/"born from above," in the course of the discussion eliciting the famous John 3:16 among other things.  (Jn 3:1-21)
• Challenges the chief priests and the other Pharisees, who have ordered Jesus arrested and disdained the mob's ignorance of the law, by appealing to the same:  "Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?" (Jn 7:50-51)
• Joins Joseph of Arimathea, a "secret" disciple, when he comes to take down the body of Jesus.  Nicodemus provides a hundred pounds of burial spices, a king's burial offering, and it is he and Joseph of Arimathea who lay the body in the new tomb (presumably owned by Joseph himself).

I like the figure of Nicodemus, but despite that I have never spent much time thinking very deeply about him, or considering what it might mean to us that we have the story of this one man popping up in multiple places, gaining courage and giving more and more. 

But I should pay more attention to Nicodemus, I think.  Of all the sinners in the Gospels it's the Pharisees in which I see myself most.  I like law, the whole notion of it, and the safeguard of a society's foundation on the rule of law instead of on monarchy or on charismatic, cultish and dangerous leaders.  I like laws, laws in the plural:  I like to understand them, dissect them, test them against various problems, and put them back together again.  I love the words that Robert Bolt puts in the mouth of Sir Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons:   

"Oh?  And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?  This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's!  And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?  Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

And of course, besides laws and rules themselves, I love wisdom, by which I often mean I love thinking myself wise, and am frequently tempted to sneer at the less-wise.  I have a reflexive tendency to trust the law too much---if it is only a well-written, well-conceived law---and to think that systems can fix the problem of human nature.  Standard operating procedures---handbooks---constitutions---contracts.  I mean, I really do know better, but I catch myself thinking it anyway, or at least behaving as if I thought it.   

Mind you, the rich young man is also the sort of sinner I can identify with, but that's only because I happen to be relatively rich.  Had I not been, I'd still have written within me the sort of things that make me identify uncomfortably with the Pharisees.  It's more aligned with my essence.

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So I should pay more mind to Nicodemus, who first sneaks around by night, drawn to Jesus and wanting to dialogue with him, and himself drawing out some of His best-remembered words; then, back among the council, challenges them within the bounds of their shared value-system (and for his trouble is accused of being "a Galilean" himself); finally, openly, before the sun sets on the day of the Crucifixion, joins another previously secret disciple, bringing the expensive spices, and performs that great merciful work on the body of the dead Christ.   I myself felt a bit sneaky about coming to Jesus at first.  I still like appealing to shared values, in dialogue with smart people who have a different idea about Him than I do, and trying to maintain my ties among the wise and learned and respectable people (but at the same time, making my own poor efforts to put Him in a better light according to their eyes).  

The question remains for me whether I have gone far enough that I can make the final step of faith that Nicodemus is remembered for:  in the end, he served Jesus openly, treating his body with the honor and respect that he knew Jesus to deserve.  It was an act of mercy; it was in obedience to the Law he held dear (hastily, so as not to trespass the Sabbath); it was in company with the privileged, who had the ear of Pilate.  But it must have also been an expression of devotion, of real love.  Not, over the old norms, a trespass, but a transcending.

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I discovered, in my further reading, Henry Vaughan's poem "The Night." Here it is:

Through that pure virgin shrine,

That sacred veil drawn o’er Thy glorious noon,

That men might look and live, as glowworms shine,

             And face the moon,

    Wise Nicodemus saw such light

    As made him know his God by night.

 

         Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes

Thy long-expected healing wings could see,

             When Thou didst rise!

    And, what can never more be done,

    Did at midnight speak with the Sun!

 

         O who will tell me where

He found Thee at that dead and silent hour?

What hallowed solitary ground did bear

             So rare a flower,

    Within whose sacred leaves did lie

    The fulness of the Deity?

 

         No mercy-seat of gold,

No dead and dusty cherub, nor carved stone,

But His own living works did my Lord hold

             And lodge alone;

    Where trees and herbs did watch and peep

    And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.

 

         Dear night! this world’s defeat;

The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb;

The day of spirits; my soul’s calm retreat

             Which none disturb!

    Christ’s progress, and His prayer time;

    The hours to which high heaven doth chime;

 

         God’s silent, searching flight;

When my Lord’s head is filled with dew, and all

His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;

             His still, soft call;

    His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch,

    When spirits their fair kindred catch.

 

         Were all my loud, evil days

Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark tent,

Whose peace but by some angel’s wing or voice

             Is seldom rent,

    Then I in heaven all the long year

    Would keep, and never wander here.

 

         But living where the sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire

Themselves and others, I consent and run

             To every mire,

    And by this world’s ill-guiding light,

    Err more than I can do by night.

 

         There is in God, some say,

A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

             See not all clear.

    O for that night! where I in Him

    Might live invisible and dim!

 

Back to basics, in a brand-new way.

Here we are, in Lent again.  Days have come when the Bridegroom has been lifted from us --- or when we feel, acutely, the absence of the Bridegroom --- or try to notice it --- and so, we fast.

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I went back to St. Francis de Sales earlier this winter and reviewed the extremely basic advice on prayer in Introduction to the Devout Life.   There's some stuff in there where he writes that certain people aren't gifted in the art of mental prayer,  they only know how to practice vocal prayer, and so in order to help that sort of person, he gives some detailed advice (it's in part II) about how to do it.   

I confess that the first time I read ITTDL I did not really take to heart the possibility of being defective in the art of mental prayer. 

After all (I thought), I am not living in the year 1600; reading is not an uncommon pastime; I, unlike the good saint's clients, have also seen lots of movies; I can easily picture the things I think about.  I am a thoughtful person and I think a lot, and I do not have to move my lips when I am thinking about things, or reading things.  I do not need to be reciting a formula and thinking about the formula, although of course that is a good discipline to take up. Because, you see, I can think about anything I want whenever I want, like any modern who does not suffer from a particularly diminished attention span.

But it occurred to me recently that "thinking" is maybe not the same thing as "mental prayer" or even "meditation."  And then I considered something I noticed a long time ago:  a great deal of my attempts at mental prayer and even vocal prayer give way, rather quickly, to thinking.  I can't tell you how many times I've started a brief morning offering, child's play, and twenty minutes later realized I was actually making a grocery list in my head.   

So... maybe it's time to start over, with a little more humility?

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It isn't quite true to say that I reviewed the Introduction, it's more that I went back and really read and worked through the parts about "how to do mental prayer even if you are totally convinced that you will never be able to do it."  You know, as if I was totally convinced I didn't know how to do it, instead of reading it as if I already knew that I knew how to do it, NBD.

I don't use the term "convicted" very much but, er, from II.5:

After using your imagination you begin to use your understanding, and this is what we call meditation; in other words, making use of considerations to raise your heart to God and to the things of God.  This is where meditation differs from study and from considerations which are made to become learned, or to write or to engage in discussion.

(Après l'action de l'imagination, s'ensuit l'action de l'entendement, que nous appelons méditation, qui n'est autre chose qu'une ou plusieurs considérations faites afin d'émouvoir nos affections en Dieu et aux choses divines:  en quoi la méditation est différente de l'étude et des autres pensées et considérations, lesquelles ne se font pas pour acquérir la vertu ou l'amour de Dieu, mais pour quelques autres fins et intentions, comme pour deviner savant, pour en ecrire, ou disputer.)

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Anybody out there read French, or astute enough at examining texts to notice that my English translation (Fr. Michael Day's) is missing a clause?

Here's my own somewhat dynamic translation, in case you would like help.

After using your imagination, you'll move on to using your understanding.  This is what we call meditation, which is nothing more or less than to mull over one or a few things, but done in order to stir up our affections toward God and toward the things of God.  It's in this that meditation differs from study, and from other kinds of thinking on things; those kinds we don't do in order to get better at virtue or at loving God, but for other intents and purposes, such as to become learned, or to write about them, or to argue about them.

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So, yes, this time through I picked up a copy in French, Texte Authentique Intégral but avec l'orthographe moderne, des notes et un glossaire.

It may seem a little surprising that I haven't dug into the Introduction à la Vie Dévote before, since I do read French, and I enjoy linguistic comparisons, and this is basically my favorite devotional work ever and I've already written about it quite a lot here on the blog.  

It's really only in the past couple of years (thanks to determinedly plowing through several detective novels ALOUD) that my French has been fluent enough that I can pick up a complex work and, you know, read it.  So the words go into your head?  You know, without having to work very hard?  I mean, I still have to keep the dictionary app close at hand because I run into new words all the time, it's not a function of vocabulary, it's more an ability for the sentences to make sense immediately in the order that the words arrive.

So anyway, that passage above hit me right between the eyes, the bit I'd not read before about the difference between thinking and meditating.   Because I pretty much always approached mental prayer as if there was something I had to figure out.  And yes, quite often, in order to come up with something to write about (hello, blog) or a good argument (hello, Facebook and Twitter).  

I mean, it worked?  The inside of my own mind is a fountain of things to write about and argue about.  Some of the arguments and the writings are pretty good!  If I do say so myself.

(Luke 18:11.  Depending on your translation, you may get The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed thus .... or you might get The Pharisee, standing, prayed thus to himself...  yep, or Le pharisien, debout, priait ainsi en lui-même...)

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What's been missing is that notion, that intent, to émouvoir nos affections en Dieu.  The English raise your heart to God just didn't quite make me notice it; I'm afraid that as an Anglophone, I think of "my heart" more as connoting "my innermost being, my core," for better or worse, and the thing about me is that I am centered very much in the mind and distrustful of feelings, the movements of the adrenal gland, the motives in emotion.  So I passed serenely over it and never really noticed the contrast intended between the intent to "raise your heart to God" and "to study... to become learned, or to write or to engage in discussion."  (Not that the saint thinks these things are bad, it's clear that he just doesn't name them "mental prayer."

It was the missing bit, with its implication:  All that is well and good, but it isn't going to help you grow in virtue or love God any better.

Let's just say it got my attention.

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So I've carefully read and re-read that second part, in French, for the past few weeks, as a sort of preparation for Lent, and I've found another interesting thing, too, which is that I can't go from reading French prayer advice in French and then put the book down and immediately start talking (to myself or to God) in English.   No, I generally find myself going straight into French in my mind too, which is utterly weird because I'm only kinda fluent?  Although there's no one there to correct my grammar so that helps.  And I don't have immediate access to fine shades of meaning?  And I'm extra on alert not to accidentally switch into "practicing language learning" mode, so I'm not picking up my dictionary, but I'm forced to give voice to my prayer and meditation in much more concrete and simple terms ---childlike terms --- than I normally do?

And I kind of understand, now, a little bit better, a tiny piece of the special magic of having a liturgical language?  The code-switching, the turning on of a circuit inside you that puts you in a different state of mind --- for me, here, a fresher state of mind, a younger and more halting one?

If nothing else, I feel that I hear St. Francis's real voice a little bit better.  I really do.  And I am looking at this book in a whole new way (and wondering what other details Fr. Michael Day might have left out -- I still think his translation is great for its conversational and intimate tone, but now I'm side-eyeing him a little bit.  Maybe the publisher made him cut out bits that sounded repetitive and didn't admit it on the dust jacket).

I know that I can't necessarily recommend this particular reading to everyone, although I will go ahead and say:  if you do read another language with reasonable fluidity, maybe give some of the classic spiritual works in that language a try, particularly if you've already read them in translation.  It's quite a different experience.

And if you don't think your fluency is quite up to speed yet, maybe try the detective novels as a first step.  Couldn't hurt!

My kind of pep talk.

I've been going around grumbling inside my head. "Our leaders suck and that sucks, and we can't do anything about it because everybody sucks."

Yes, I'm that articulate inside my head these days.

And outside my head?  Stunted, perhaps, by the lack of adequate vocabulary?

I haven't been saying much out loud, at least not when it comes to anything related to leaders and authorities.  Dinner table conversation in that direction has largely petered out, and not necessarily been replaced by anything more wholesome; given a conversational vacuum, the children will squabble, or talk about cartoons.  There's always the latest technical challenge from Mark's job, or what the kids' schoolwork is like, and other normal things; but there's a gap that used to be filled with "Did you see where...[political or legal or Catholic-church-related news item]?" and it's mostly empty, because who wants to ruin dinner?

Indeed, this post will also be short.

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Why?  Why do we have such bad leaders?  Why?  Why?  Why?

Even the "good" ones we have right now, or the good potential ones who might come along to replace the bad ones, well, likely they only seem good by comparison.    Add a little power to the mix and who knows what you'll get.

The answer comes back bearing either despair or hope, depending on which way the coin comes down, or is it which way we turn it:   

I, too, am a leader.  

And I know what's in myself, what I hide and what I display, what I work for and what I let fall.

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I saw a video clip of an ice tsunami yesterday:  a sheet of ice gently approaching a sloped pebbly beach, and suddenly crumbling on itself and piling higher and higher, shoving sand and pebbles out of its way, overflowing like foam, building into an unclimbable wall. 

Such is the effect of the force and weight of our small decisions, adding together.  

It's neither an absolution nor a condemnation.  It's just that however placed, we all have the potential inside us, the potential to do terrible things, at least things that feel terrible and look terrible to the inner heart of someone who depends on us.   To lead badly.  To lead directly into the abyss and to take others with us.  

Bloom where you are planted has a flip side.

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And the source of both the dismay and the hope is the apparent smallness of what I can or must do about it.

Our leaders suck, eh?  

That's a figure of speech.

Despair, the belief that everything, everyone, every system, is permanently broken, sucks too:  sucks you in, sucks the energy and light out of the room, sucks everything towards itself, creates an inflowing wind, one that's hard to push against.

But what is broken outside myself is the same kind of thing that's broken within myself, and---difficult as it is, I know something about how the little breach in me is to be repaired.   And I know, too, who looks to me.  I am a leader as well.  

So.  There's something I can do.   Now is the acceptable time.

 

Consolations and the prosperity gospel.

Amy Welborn recently put up a post on the prosperity gospel's more subtle forms, a "well-trodden road" that she's considered many times.   

This is an interesting discussion, because while some versions (the "health-and-wealth" gospel) are so obviously out of line with orthodox Christian thought as to be almost a parody, others are more difficult to untangle precisely because they seem to grow right out of unarguably Christian and Judeo-Christian beliefs.  

It’s easy for us to look at an interpretation of Christianity with which we disagree and dismiss it out of hand, mock or condemn it – especially something as obviously wrong as the health-and-wealth gospel. More fruitful, I think, is to look at the why and the roots and explore how aspects of an incorrect interpretation might have crept into our own thinking. To examine it, see what’s true, what’s false and use it as a way, not so much to condemn others – over whom we have no control – but to grow in our own faith and conform ourselves more closely to truth.

So let’s take the most recent newsworthy example – pastor John Gray purchasing a $200K Lamborghini for his wife.  Gray defended his purchase against criticism by pointing out that he’d not used church money to buy it, but rather money from a book deal, a television show on Oprah’s network and other income sources. He didn’t go whole hog Prosperity in defending it, but he did say: “God helped me to make my wife’s dream come true,” he wrote in an Instagram post Tuesday night. “Why not? She’s made mine come true!”

This is a little different from promising the impoverished that if they align themselves correctly with God’s will, they’ll find more material comfort, but the very basic fundamentals are the same: When we do God’s will, it shows in our earthly lives. God helps us make our dreams come true.

This is not, of course, incorrect. The deep roots of the Prosperity Gospel are in the ancient life of Israel. Read Psalms, read Proverbs. External blessing is a sign of God's favor in our tradition.

But then along came the Exile.  And the challenge of Job. God’s people had to ask themselves: What does it mean to be blessed by God? What does God’s presence among us look like?

The philosophical problem here is that our faith teaches that here on earth, all good things, visible and invisible, do come from God.   And we have plenty of Scripture to back us up that God does (at least some of the time) provide some kind of good to His faithful servants.  Perhaps health and wealth and safety; perhaps supportive mentors, friends, and family; perhaps graces of understanding and acceptance that help us put into perspective our lack of such things.  

And yet... if this is the leaping-off point... can we leap off in the wrong direction?  

One of the biggest dangers would be if we become satisfied.   Satisfied that our temporal blessings (visible and invisible) constitute evidence that we are doing the Christian life correctly.  Satisfied, too, in the sense of no longer... longing.

Amy muses in this direction:

It seems to me that the fundamental error of any “Prosperity Gospel” lies in the elevation of the truth that yes, we find authentic peace and true joy when our wills and choices are aligned with God’s will. That’s the truth we find in the very beginning of Scripture: Adam and Eve at peace in the Garden, and then at war with each other, God, nature and themselves outside of it.

The way that a “Prosperity Gospel” twists this truth is when it encourages us to uncritically identify the fruits of a right relationship with God with anything temporal.

It instrumentalizes the spiritual life.

So now, look beyond the easy targets of health-and-wealth. Survey the contemporary popular spiritual landscape, Catholic and otherwise. If there’s a current self-help trend out there, are spiritual gurus close behind, baptizing it?

ou might see and hear some of this:

Through faith, I came to understand my purpose and look at the success I’ve found because of that.

Through faith, I came to see and accept how beautiful I am, and what true beauty is.

Because of faith, I feel great about myself and affirm my life as amazing and accomplished.

This is hard, this is tricky, and I hope I can tease this apart correctly. Because I’m sure this might be striking you as just wrong. Because isn’t that  part of what faith is? In accepting Jesus as Lord of my life, aren’t I opening myself to a re-orientation, a proper understanding of myself and my relationship to the world that’s going to bear this fruit?

True. All that is fruit of a relationship with Christ.

Plot twist: But it’s really not that important, either.

 

There's more, and you should go read what she has to say.   

But I think there may be a way to... make it a little less tricky?  The Prosperity Gospel is a modern thing, but human nature is the same as always, and I suspect it's merely a new-ish manifestation of a very old temptation.

In short:  Humans are perfectly capable of taking true graces that truly come from God and... screwing up our responses to them.

+ + + 

This is what I wonder: 

This sort of celebration of temporal happiness and satisfaction, accompanied by a broader understanding of what happiness and satisfaction means

--e.g. “Now that I know what true beauty is” — something unspecified, but more than just conventional outer attractiveness — “I see that I am beautiful.”

--Or: “now that I know what true wealth is, I see that I am wealthy”) ---

might fall under the category of “consolations.”  

Consolations are, in the writings of the saints and in the writings of the magisterium, the opposite of affliction.   These are free gifts of happiness, contentment, felt blessings, confidence in the presence of God, strong feelings of conviction. All bestowed by God on some of the faithful, and occasionally understood to be withdrawn from them by God, as a means of increasing their (or someone's) growth in faith.

Numerous saints have warned Christians against mistaking the consolation for something it is not. It is not (necessarily) a reward or a punishment; it is certainly not a reliable indication of the holiness of the individual, such that holier people receive more or fewer consolations; and while we may hope for consolations, we are expressly warned against making the consolation the end that we seek.

In the Introduction to the Devout Life (IV.13) St. Francis de Sales includes "Spiritual and sensible  consolations" in the catalog of temptations to be overcome. 

[Man's state] is ever changing, constantly in movement; his life on earth like waters which ebb and flow, sometimes lifted up by hope, sometimes depressed by fear, swept one way by consolation, another by affliction; no day, no hour, exactly the same.

It is well to remember this, for we must strive to preserve our equanimity in the midst of these various changes; though all should change about is we must remain immovable, our eyes and our hearts ever fixed on God.

He then lists items of "particular advice," which are really quite detailed and wonderful but which I will paraphrase here for brevity.

1. Feelings of pleasure, sadness, consolation, or compassion which make our spiritual exercises pleasing or agreeable are not evidence of real devotion and can even be "snares of the devil, who encourages them to make much of these consolations and take such satisfaction in them that they no longer seek true devotion, which is to do constantly, resolutely, promptly, and energetically whatever we know to be pleasing to God."
2. However, they are sometimes very useful, for they make the spiritual life attractive to us.  "
3. How to know the difference between the two situations?   You will knmow them by the fruit they yield.  Our hearts are as trees, our feelings and desires their branches, our actions which follow from them the fruit.  If [consolations] make us more hunble and patient, considerate and merciful towards our neighbour, more fervent in mortifying our evil desires and inclinations, more constant in our devotion, more docile and submissive to those in authority over us, more simple in our lives [!], there can be no doubt that they come from God; but if we seek such feelings for our own satisfaction, if they make us selfish, irritable, self-assertive, impatient, overbearing, proud, presumptuous and harsh towards others and make us imagine that we are already saints and no longer in need of guidance or correction there is no doubt that they are false and evil....
4. We must receive consolations with humility, never taking them for evidence of our own goodness, and use them according to God's intention, and also "occasionally detatch ourselves" from consolations by protesting to God that we seek only His love and not the sensible goods that he sends.

Now, St. Francis doesn't take the position that I suggested above, that all consolations come from God and it is our response to them that matters.  He phrases it that some consolations are good and come from God whereas others arise "from our fallen nature" or are "sent by the devil."  I think either construction works.

If indeed the sentiments that lead one into the prosperity-gospel error are incorrect responses to real spiritual consolations, then the ancient and medieval fathers will have much to say to us about how to avoid falling into this apparently modern error.

 

 

 

Tripping.

I am sitting at my kitchen counter, waiting for the pizza that will feed my three kids and their grandma and grandpa, my husband’s parents, for dinner.  Not long after the pizza man knocks, the bell will toll for me, and it will be a taxi taking me and a suitcase to the airport.  

Grandma and Grandpa are here all week, spending Thanksgiving with the kids at our house, and me?  Well, I am going to be... elsewhere!  And (except from 8 to 5) with Mark!

I will have plenty of time during the day while he is at work, assisting with tweaking the controls on the startup of a snack-food line.   Keeping my fingers crossed that when Friday rolls around he will not be needed anymore and we can dash off for a weekend before both of us return home together next week.

At this point I should pause and note that we have spent exactly one night away from the children since our oldest was born at the turn of the century, and we have never gone anywhere just the two of us on a plane since our honeymoon.

The time went by.... really fast?  And we enjoyed going places with our kids, and occasionally alone while the other stayed back?  What I am saying is, no regrets.

But just in time for our twentieth anniversary is a good time to go have a little fun.  (Thanks to those lovely grandparents.)

Perhaps I will report back later?

 

Specialization and generalization.

Yesterday was a very busy and raucous co-schooling day at my house, but it was fun, for a couple of reasons.

The first is a welcome new development for this year:  H and I now have our friend M joining us again after a few years of working through different options, with the one child that she's homeschooling this year.  It's so lovely to have her back with us twice a week; we've really missed her and her kids.  I made taco salad for lunch (general recipe at the end of the post), and M brought apple crisp and cheese for afternoon snack, and we kept the coffee flowing.  Faster now that teen boys drink it.

The second thing is that I have fun things to teach this year, practically all high-school level.  I had to skip geometry today because of an unintentional late start, but I still got to teach one of the enjoyable parts of civics, and a challenging-to-communicate topic in chemistry, and all about relative clauses in Latin.  By the end of the day I was, truly, happy about how I'd done (at least from my end; can't know how well the kids absorbed it all).  I enjoyed interacting with the kids each time, and as I looked back on the day, I was left feeling:  "Hey!  I'm pretty smart.  I did a good job."  Which always feels nice.

+ + +

Mark, too, has been having some successes at work that leave him feeling good.  We were talking about our days last night over dinner out (new "soul-inspired, chef-created" place went in a few blocks from our house; grits and biscuits and collard greens and country ham feature prominently, as well as brioche buns and good craft beer); we talked about them some more over coffee this morning.  A lot of Mark's research and development work winds up being proprietary to his employer, but he occasionally gets to publish with his colleagues:  there are eight patents, for example.  He doesn't have to be secretive about the fact that he's done significant work on prominent and popular brands.  And soon he'll be an author on a new open-access  item that's the culmination of a lengthy collaboration he's really proud of.

"It's very weird to work on the same project for years," he told me this morning.

"I know what you mean," I said.  "I am not sorry that I had the opportunity to become an expert in one very narrow subject area.  It was a valuable experience, to learn how to focus that tightly for so long.  But I am glad that I did not spend my life's work on it."

"I'm not sure if I'm a specialist or a generalist," he said thoughtfully.   "On the one hand, I'm definitely one of the go-to guys in my specific area of work--" [this sentence heavily paraphrased to remove technical details --ed.] "--on the other, I enjoy being the person who generally knows how to solve whatever problem happens to come up anywhere in the process."

"Perhaps you're not all that different in scope from an academic.  I mean, they may be the worldwide expert on one very narrow thing; they do active research on a set of narrowly related different topics; they have to have a working understanding of everything closely related to the field so that they can spot new directions of inquiry and support or criticize their colleagues' work; and they have to stay well-enough grounded in the basics of the field that they can deal with it if they have to teach some random undergraduate class."

I didn't get to hear his thoughts analyzing that one, because he looked at his watch and had to jump up and give me a kiss and run out the door because he had a 7:00 a.m. call to Europe and a meeting across town right after that. 

Me, I poured myself another cup of coffee and wrapped my bathrobe more tightly around myself and settled back on the couch, thinking about writing a blog post in the time before the children wake.

+ + +

Chemistry yesterday was the most challenging to teach, not because I don't grasp the material well, but because the material is not very easy to explain to newbies.  The language that's used by convention seems poorly designed; maybe it's the best we could do, but sometimes you'd like to go back in time and straighten people out before they named things.  ("Ben.  Trust me.  You want to label the resinous electricity as 'positive.'  Not the vitreous electricity.") 

Anyway, I was laying the foundation for understanding electron configurations:  the four principal quantum numbers, how they give a unique "address" for each electron in the multielectron atom.  At one point the teen boys were laughing:  "Wait, the numbers are called n, l, m... and SPIN?"  and:  "Wait, l is also s, p, d, and f?"

["No... l is allowed to have the values zero through n-1.  It's just that when it's zero, we call it s, and when it's 1, we call it p, and so on.  It's like a code.  I don't think the reason why we haven't changed to using numbers is anything other than that it's less confusing to label, say, 3p instead of calling them 3-1 orbitals."  I've since looked it up and been reminded what I had forgotten, that s, p, d, f stand for sharp, principal, diffuse, and fundamental, and refer to groups of spectral lines.  I'll be sure to tell them next time we meet.] 

The whiteboard was a mess, but it made sense.  I loved it.

Then in Latin we read through a long passage of a story from the textbook which was designed to teach them about relative pronouns (qui quae quod, "which/that" as in "the fruit that rotted was an orange") and the use of the same words as interrogative adjectives ("which/what" as in "what fruit rotted?") and demonstrative adjectives (ille illa illud, "that" as in "that fruit was really disgusting") and demonstrative pronouns ("that" as in "that made me sick) and third person pronouns (is ea id, "he/she/it" as in "it totally had to be trashed.")  In all five cases ("the fruit that made me sick"/"the person whose lunch this is will be disappointed"/"to whom can I complain about the fridge?"/"the odor that I smelled is tremendous"/"the bin in which I will throw this is over there").  It's relatively elementary stuff but there was a giant chart on my whiteboard and also some passages in which I had to keep switching marker colors so I could show them how the relative clauses and the prepositional phrases can be set apart from the main thrust of the sentence for easier translating.  And it was all very fun.

And finally there was Civics, where I am going through parts that are not so suffused with gloom and disappointment, but the workmanlike stuff of, having discussed the history first, outlining the Constitution (Preamble.  Articles, I-III in the first group, IV-VII in another.  Amendments:  1-10 in the first group, 11-27 in another,)  giving them the big picture as they get ready to read it straight through for the first time.  All laid out once again on the same whiteboard.

+ + +

I have to think about all of these things, and how to communicate them, and I like that it's languages and politics and chemistry.  I never get sick of it.  I'm not saying I would necessarily have been sick of it if I was concentrating on only chemistry, or only languages, but I do like having to think hard about all three.

Am I a generalist or a specialist?  I specialize in a small group of kids, and I specialize in putting things into terms they can understand.  That's kind of a special skill.  But it requires me to know a fair amount about quite a lot of different things.  Not very prestigious; no publications yet (since I quit academia); but day to day, pretty fun, and I count it valuable to our family.  I suppose that's more important than how it is categorized, and that goes for what Mark does too.

______

*Taco salad:  a lot of ingredients but a relatively simple and low-mess way to feed a crowd with varying tastes.  My crowd had three 4yo, two elementary schoolkids, two junior high age kids, two high school boys, and three adult women.  I do this:

• Put a cup (dry) of brown rice on in my rice cooker in the morning
• brown three pounds of 80% lean ground beef, season it generously with a mild spice mix (packets or your own), and put it in the crockpot with some water to stay hot; when the rice is done, mix that in (the rice absorbs the fat and flavor, and extends the meat some, and also rice served separately gets all over the place).  That will keep till lunch.
• shred half a small red cabbage, chop 1 green bell pepper, and tear up two hearts of romaine; mix
• put out the salad mix and the crockpots with bowls of: spicy pinto beans, plain black beans, sliced black olives, chopped avocado, sour cream, cheddar cheese, mild salsa, hot sauce, and tortilla chips.  Let kids decide what goes in their salad, unless they are four, in which case parents make the best guess.

The year of three languages.

Mark and the three older kids are gone camping this weekend, and Saturday was cold and drizzly, and the house was already clean because Friday I had paid a person to come clean it, so I gave the two little boys leave to play quietly and watch videos while I dove deeply into hours and hours of brain work. 

About half of it I spent on Latin---plans for teaching it---and about half I spent on Somali---at a tedious but necessary stage of learning it.

And somewhere on my mental to-do list, Swedish is lingering around, and I'm going to have to turn to this eventually, in June or so.

+ + +

Somali first.  (My most recent post on learning Somali is here, containing links to earlier posts.)

I've been cruising through the textbook at seven pages per week, aiming to hit the reading goal by the time my little study group meets again in a month.  Mainly I advance through the book all at once in a few hours on a Saturday, making flash cards as I go out of the exercises, and I review the flashcards daily thereafter.

I didn't quite make my goal last week because when I ran up against declining nouns with the definite article appended, I couldn't hold all the different rules for spelling changes in my head at once.  

Summary of what I'm trying to learn. 

• Noun cases are subject, genitive, vocative, and absolutive (think none-of-the-above).  To change the case or the number, you change the ending, mostly, and also the stress-tone pattern.
• But when you append the definite article suffix, you have to use a fifth form, called the premodifier, that is unmarked for case.  It may have a different ending, too.
• The case marker appears instead in the choice of article:  -ta, or -tíi, or -ka, or kíi, for absolutive, and -tu, or -tii, or -ku, or -kii, for subject. 
• (-t- is for feminine nouns and -k- is for masculine nouns). 
• But for sound-production reasons, depending on the ending of the noun's premodifier form, a -t- may change to a -d- and the -k- may change to a -g- or a -h- or be deleted.  Also sometimes before -k- the last vowel of the noun changes to match the vowel of the article.
• In most of the declensions, pluralizing the noun changes its ending and its gender.

So far, given a noun, I learn the singular absolutive; the plural absolutive; then I learn how to change both to the premodifier form; then I have to decide "is it masculine or feminine?"; then I have to work out whether the ending is one that requires changing the -t- or -k- to something else; finally, if it's a -k-, whether I need to change a vowel too. 

(I'll get into the difference between, say, -ku and -kii, some other time.  I haven't entirely learned it.  The latter is kind of like a demonstrative, but with some additional layers.)

So, I didn't do very well on my first set of exercises, and I decided yesterday that what I really needed was to write out a whole lot of nouns from all seven declensions, one case and number at a time, so I could see the patterns.  Then I could sort the nouns in each declension into groups according to what happened to their endings.

Behold!  Ecce!  Waa kan!   I have about ten pages of this, organized by declension and number.

 

The issue here is that the book teaches the organization of nouns in a way that isn't the way I've had success in other languages.  I need to mentally hang each new noun on a "hook" that's, essentially, "nouns that decline just like this one."  There are more hooks in Somali than there are in Latin or French, but otherwise the process is essentially the same.  

So my next step is a Big Sort, and then I can start thinking about nouns, "Well, this one declines like saaxibad" and I'll be able to start hanging them up one at a time.

+ + +

Okay, moving on to Latin.  I'm going to save most of this for another series of posts, but I spent a lot of yesterday working out how to put all the different pieces of next year's Latin goals together.  I really, really love Lingua Latina, the curriculum I've now switched to, and the kids are enjoying it a lot; but it's super freeform compared to the Mother of Divine Grace lesson plans for Henle Latin , which I used with the kids who are now graduating.   

Last time, I needed the structure of MODG/Henle when I was learning along with the kids.  MODG's spiral-bound syllabus literally laid out exactly what the student was to do every single day, five days a week (which vocabulary to drill, which charts to recite, which grammar concepts to read about, which exercises to do) and had a complete set of quizzes and tests.  It's also set up for self-teaching.  

But the approach of Lingua Latina is much more fun for the next batch of kids (ages 11-15 now).  And I've got enough Latin under my belt that I can actually guide them through it.  (A motivated, language-loving, puzzle-solving sort of person could probably self-teach with it, but for all others it's better to have a guide.)  Incidentally, LL is fairly popular as a two-semester college course, which means that for me it will function as a two-year high school course and so I can get through about half of it next year.  I have a five-chapter head start so I'll do half of what's left, i.e., chapters VI through XX.

Anyway, besides working through the text, I need to do assessments, form drills, grammar reviews, some English grammar teaching, and additional cultural/historical stuff.  And figure out the best way to fit it into each week of two 90-minute classes (each class in two sessions with a break between) and two homework assignments.  So yesterday was Massive Spreadsheet Time, but everything I put in was a placeholder; later I have to go in and work out what pages to read for each assignment, etc.

I've generally worked out that I'll do each chapter in four class periods:  introduction, text, text, followup; introduction, text, text, followup.  We'll see if I can fit all the bits for each class into one 90-minute period plus one homework assignment.  

Don't @ me for putting in my spreadsheet, e.g., "Show me exercitia" instead of "Show me exercitiam."  I can't code-switch that quickly when I'm trying to organize.

+ + +

OK now, Swedish.

Not much advancement in that area, just a little tickle in the brain, but I'm pulling together the resources to pull one of my kids out of Latin and enroll him in adult language classes at the American Swedish Institute, which is a 30 minutes' walk from my house. 

The American Swedish Institute.

This is a classic case of Adapting the Homeschool to a Child's Specific Needs.  He is having a rough time of it in Latin with the other three kids, and he's not enjoying it at all.  Having dabbled with him in other languages here and there, I'm convinced that the problem isn't just that he Hates Latin; he is going to have to work disproportionately hard on any language, certainly harder than he wants to.

But... foreign language is not entirely optional.  Two years are required for freshman admissions at most four-year-colleges he might apply to.  Although there are of course numerous other options out there besides freshman admission into a four-year, he wants to have a shot at this path, and so we need to find a way to hit that minimum.  

So, this has been a mini-epiphany for me, the kind of person who always felt ashamed to be anything other than The Best or at least Near The Top.

Sometimes... the most important thing is hitting the minimum, and doing so with the least damage to other parts of the whole person.

And when you shift your focus from "what is the absolute optimal learning experience we can have, with the most joy and excitement and fascination and love of learning?" to "what is the best way for us to hit the minimum requirements?" --- you often wind up going in an entirely different direction.

I'll save some of that for another post, probably after we've gone to the ASI and had our introductory Swedish class.  Anyway, the point now is that I am trying to plan so that he can earn his two credits at half-pace, over four years.  I only have a vague idea at this point of how it's going to work, and to some extent we are at the mercy of the class schedule, which hasn't come out yet. 

So the extent of my preparation is a lot of muttering of  Please please please don't let his only choice be Monday evenings.  

This is going to be a very linguistic year.