Lent 2: The Second of the Seven Last Words

Pray Sunday Vespers with us,  and join my theologian husband in meditating on Christ's words to the penitent thief who shared His suffering and, ultimately, His heavenly feast:

a.m.d.g. and for the poor souls


And Jesus said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

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The Gospel according to St. Luke, Chapter 23(RSV-CE):

33    And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left.
34     And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." And they cast lots to divide his garments.
35     And the people stood by, watching; but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!"
36     The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him vinegar,
37     and saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!"
38     There was also an inscription over him, "This is the King of the Jews."
39     One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!"
40     But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
41     And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong."
42     And he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."
43     And he said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."
44     It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. . . .

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This afternoon we are concentrating on the second of the seven last “words” or sayings of our Lord from the Cross.  The seven last words of Christ are not all found in one Gospel.  The Church has compiled them from all four of the Gospels together, and has arranged them in a sequence.  This helps us to see the whole scope of our Lord’s crucifixion, a very nice complement to the reading of any one of the Gospels which will give us that Evangelist’s view of the Divine Sacrifice, told in such a way as to give his audience a particular sort of clarity on salvation.

 The scene here in Luke’s gospel gives us an incomparable juxtaposition of the Redeemer with the redeemed, and with the damned.  Here, in the figures of the two thieves, are men who are sharing the cross of Christ in completely different ways.  One of the men recognized the cross for what it is—a Royal Throne of Sacrifice—and the other, as rotten bad luck; it is the last chapter in his rebellion against all that is of God.

Astoundingly, one of the criminals says to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”  How did this criminal come to believe in Jesus as his King?  Jesus is the most unlikely of kings, hanging beside him on a Roman cross.  The jeers of the crowd definitely represent the winning side.  They mock the kingship of Jesus;  Roman victory hangs in the air again, as usual.  They put up an inscription over Jesus just to drive home the point.

“The Good Thief,” as he has come to be known in Tradition, rebukes his companion when he suggests that Christ should get them off the hook at this most fateful juncture.  He reminds his companion that they deserve what they are getting, but that Jesus has done nothing wrong.  How did he come to know this?    Did he see Jesus’ innocence in his face or demeanor.  Did he hear the first word of Christ from the Cross, forgiving the crowds and persecutors, and come to believe through the example of Jesus’ sovereign mercy?  Whatever the source of his belief, it is reckoned to him as great faith:  “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

It is futile to dwell on the crucified man who was not the “Good Thief.” He belongs to the class of biblical characters that includes Judas Iscariot;  Herod;   Dathan and Abiram of the Old Testament, who were swallowed by the earth;  Sisera;  and Holofernes, who was beheaded by Judith.  He perishes in his sin, we reckon, chillingly. He also represents the blindness of the Pharisees, the obstinacy of the Sadducees, and the corruption of the Priests.  If only he had known the drama of which he had become a part!

The Good Thief has come to believe that if Jesus will only remember him, merely think of him, that he will somehow share in his Kingdom.  This is, indeed, great faith.  “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom.”  This is an act of faith like so many in the scriptures.  It is like believing that if one could only touch the hem of his garment,  one would be healed; or like believing that one word of Jesus would, even at a distance,  heal a person on the verge of death. Jesus always answers such great acts of faith with his supernatural grace and power.  It seems that he loves to do so, that he greatly desires such faith and willingly abandons himself to it.  Clearly he knows that such faith passes through him to the Father, and he denies nothing to the Father.  Likewise, He does not deny to the Father the redeemed soul of this penitent thief.  Rather, he honors his Father’s Kingdom with a new and eternal citizen.

If Christ can deliver all of this to the thief who repents—at his last breath—what might come for us who are willing to make our entire lives a pilgrimage to the Kingdom?  Merits? For sure.  Conquering faith?  No doubt. The casting out of demons and every vice? At least.  Virtue?  Patience? Humility? A clear conscience?  Yes, all of these and more.  It is not as though we rank ourselves above the Good Thief; it is just that we are given the opportunity to realize everything he would have chosen to do, if he could have lived his life over in preparation for the Kingdom he would finally inherit.  Indeed, what a lodestar and encouragement is this Good Thief for those of us who yet struggle in this vale of tears, in hope and yearning for the Kingdom of God.

“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Paradise:  Ninety-nine out of a hundred days we cannot even conceive what this Paradise must mean.  We have two problems on this score:  First, we are squashed and molded by the affairs of our lives to such an extent that we cannot imagine Paradise being anything other than the resolution to these problems and difficulties, temporary and fleeting though the resolutions be.  We are looking, typically, not for Paradise, but for a sensuous Valhalla, a cool Easy Street.  We have cut Paradise down to our size.  It is an illusion, and all we have to show for these yearnings is a fixation on ourselves and our circumstances that more nearly sends us down the road of the Bad Thief than that of the Good Thief.  Maybe that is what we are: thieves intent on stealing Paradise so that we don’t have to believe in the Gift of Paradise or in its Giver.

Our other problem in conceiving Paradise revolves far less around our own culpability, but it is a killing difficulty nonetheless. Despite our desire for a great fulfillment of everything, we really do not believe that anything can be so good as Paradise.  Here, we have internalized the unbelieving despair of our age:  Nothing can be good unless it is man-made; everything man makes, sadly, is corrupt; therefore, nothing good can come to man.  It is a false (and illogical) little circle, but without God one is forced into it; one becomes disbelieving and despairing, and Paradise occupies no part of what we consider responsible thinking.  Indeed, some of the most despairing and disbelieving patrons of this way of believing are those who know how to get along—practical and utilitarian types—and the churches are loaded with them.  In this morning's homily Father mentioned the crowd, typically the young, who say, “What-EVER.”  But they are simply giving voice to the despair of their parents, from whom they learned “whatever”, even though that elder group shows despair more through manic activity than lassitude of their young.  They say “whatever” because they have never actually been shown the meaning of hope in God.

These two problems of a ruined and distorted outlook we must struggle to overcome.  By grace we can!  Yet there is something else that specifically affects the sincere believer:  we become anxious when we cannot conjure up for ourselves a vision of Paradise to behold.  We want Paradise, but we cannot picture it, and we cannot see ourselves within it.  We are puzzled.  Do we indeed lack faith?  Are we not among the elect? 

We do not lack faith.  We are not rejected.  The eyes of faith know how bright a picture Paradise is, how God dwells in unapproachable Light.  This is part of our faith.  In view of this bright immensity—God himself—we boggle and buckle at the knees.  We know we are not worthy.  And there is nothing wrong with these sentiments. The bright immensity of God must be veiled in order for us to approach it;  God has approached us under signs that we can both understand and adore.  The Blessed Sacrament is just such a sign.  The earthly life of our Lord, also, was the veiled revelation of the fullness of God.  More specifically and momentously, the Passion and Death of our Lord both veils and reveals the Paradise we seek.

If we want to see Paradise, if we hope for it, we must look into the mystical mirror of the Cross, which reflects through blood and pain and sacrifice a Paradise beyond this world and which stands as a judgment on this world in all its sloth and hatred and despair.

Looking very deeply, with all of your heart, upon the Cross, you will find that it prefigures a beauty and a harmony—a Paradise—prepared for you and me.  You must not stop gazing on such a Paradise, for to do so means death--and the walking dead are all around us.  Gazing intently on the Cross, you will see that an exchange has been made:  his death for our life. He has effected the exchange of our thievery for his Gift.  Our blindness for his remembrance of us.  Our hell for his Paradise. An Almighty Love displaces the poverty of our ruined souls and we are redeemed.  In the words of George Herbert:

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood, but I, as wine.

In the Cross, and through the Blessed Sacrament, at all times, Jesus says, “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Amen.                                         +   +   +  

Praying for Beth

Her chemotherapy two weeks ago took her white-blood count to zero;  she is now waiting for her body to begin manufacturing stem cells, which the doctors plan to harvest and transplant. As of her appointment yesterday, when she had been hoping to see some progress, nothing had happened, and her discouragement was apparent in the brief CaringBridge journal entry she posted.

Today, I think, is Day 15 post-chemo. By Day 18 her cells would ideally have begun to show signs of regeneration. If you're of a mind, and particularly if you have something onerous to do today, please consider offering your sacrifices for Beth, her stem cells, and her spirits.

Post-Mass-Post-Class Pot-Luck Lunch

Here's what we're bringing: 

1. Easy Lenten I-Just-Made-It-Up Southwestern White Bean Soup (it was going to be chili, but it's a little more soupy than chili-y)

Dump into crockpot:

1 small bag white beans (I used navy beans)
1 can diced tomatoes with juice
1 sweet onion, diced
1 bag frozen kernel corn
2 red peppers, cored and diced (I actually dumped these in this morning, after everything else had cooked all night)

water to cover
salt, chili powder, ground cumin and garlic powder to taste
bay leaf

cook in crockpot overnight

before serving, stir in grated cheese of your choice
(if you're Orthodox, ie the elite special-forces corps of Lenten fasting, you can leave out the cheese)

2. Trail Mix

2 1-lb bags shelled sunflower seeds + 1 bag chopped dates + 1 large box golden raisins in fancy Swedish-cookie tin left over from Christmas

Mid-Week Quick Takes

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Why is it still February? Wasn't this month supposed to be shorter or something? 

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In trying to type the asterisk above, I forgot to shift and typed 8. And then, knowing that I had to do something -- something, like, involving my hands and that same key -- I typed 888888888. But when I went to type all those 8's I just typed, I automatically typed an asterisk. 

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Nevertheless, I'm still learning to play the piano, with Helier and Crispina. Today we played "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and Helier also started learning "Hot Cross Buns." Crispina's working on playing E-D-C for now. The difference in coordination between 8-in-July hands and even very fine-motor-skilly 6-last-December hands is not insignificant. And then there's me. See "February" and "asterisk," above. 

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I have made an unanticipated decision which gives me great peace of mind. Next year, for the first time in seven years of homeschooling, we're going to use -- and I'm having to force myself to type this -- a prepackaged curriculum for the three younger kids. It's a gentle, flexible curriculum with, it appears, plenty of leeway for the kinds of independent exploration we love to do, and the abundance of unstructured free time we thrive on. In truth, the kids have done very well on our self-tailored program of core subjects, as last year's test scores would seem to indicate;  I'm the one who needs some structure. 

Of course, I always feel this way in February, but after years of looking at this curriculum, buying bits and pieces of it to use my own way, and liking everything I've bought, I'm ready to invest in the whole deal. It just looks like what I want to do anyway, but all planned out. 

And, as I say, having made the decision, I feel at peace with it. Now, if only it were next year already. 

Actually, I'd settle for its just not being February.  

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Reading The Return of the King for Lent, to anyone who will listen. 

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Also revamping my First Communion curriculum, in mid-stream (did I say already that it's February?). After Emily J. mentioned making First Communion books with a CCD class, I started contemplating the idea of giving my crew something to take with them when they leave, a sort of catechism scrapbook which would cover the key ideas I want them to retain:  the Trinity, Jesus' human and divine natures, Jesus in the Eucharist, Confession, Eucharistic  Adoration, the Mass, the liturgical year.  

So I began working up templates for a project which would include review of all these concepts during Lent, with April devoted to making a Mass book to include at the end. Since time is running short -- First Communion in our parish is May 1 -- this will be a color-cut-paste kind of project, but I'd like to spend the whole year on it next year and have them do it more intensively. 

I sent what I'd done to the head catechist, and now I'm presenting it at a catechists' meeting tomorrow night. 

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Crispina asks:  "Are little dogs like Lance sometimes cunning?" 

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News Flash:  Child Likes Saxon Math. Amicus finished his MCP workbook last week and began Saxon's  Algebra 1/2. He says it's less fun, but more thorough. 

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House rules posted on the whiteboard over the kitchen table:  

in my handwriting: 

1. Love God

2. Honor Mom and Dad

3. Respect Other People and Their Property

in Amicus's handwriting: 

4. The Dog is Not a Toy

in Helier's handwriting: 

5. Do Not Hurt Other People

in Crispina's handwriting:  

6. Mom Make Chili

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Gotta abide by those rules. Time to put the beans on.   

Play the Piano for Fun and Profit

That's not the name of the site my friend Linda told me about, where you can download and print out sheet music and music-theory resources for free. Tomorrow we label the piano keys and learn "Mary Had a Little Lamb," which as I recall was the first and pretty much the last thing Amicus and I ever played together on the recorder. Note:  it's a little harder to lose a piano than it is to lose a recorder, even when you didn't really mean to, entirely.

While we're at it, does anybody know where we can get similar (as in, similarly free) music for the violin? Epiphany's played through everything we currently have, and while we're waiting for our name to come up on the nice teacher's waiting list, she'd probably enjoy having something new to play.

This and That on Tuesday Morning

Yesterday, according to a baptismal certificate, was Chopin's 200th birthday. The composer himself always insisted that he had been born on March 1.

Does an innate sense of  pack rules make my dog an ethicist? An article in Scientific American links canine behaviors to the development of human moral reasoning.

Speaking of dogs . . . pediatricians are calling for a redesign of the hot dog, to reduce its potential as a choking hazard. Though we've never been big hot-dog eaters around here, I have to wonder:  what would this redesign look like? A patty? My children's English school dinners often involved ground turkey shaped into the number 2000, for example -- the Frozen Turkey Lunch Concept people cranked out millions of Turkey 2000s in December of 1999, and they were still turning up on the school menu in 2003. So . . . imagine the topical applications, so to speak, for the hotdog. If this hotdog-redesign business had come up last January, we'd no doubt have been inundated with Inaugural Doggy O's. As it is, we'll just have to wait and see.

All right, everybody! Naps after lunch! I have the New York Times on my side!

Too little too late? Or what? The Atlantic's Corby Kummer on Wal-Mart, organic food, and localism.

Speaking of produce, we've started Bibb lettuce, spinach, multi-colored chard, leeks, onions, and beets in our little indoor greenhouses. The first wave of lettuce was outgrowing the little potting-soil nodules, however, so in a fit of optimism on Sunday afternoon, I planted them outside in containers. We'll see how this cold-weather crop weathers the cold weather, or whether . . . oh, never mind. Meanwhile, some  kale which Jane-next-door gave me last year is frilling up through the fallen leaves unexpectedly -- tough stuff, kale.

And speaking of Chopin, which we were ages ago, way up at the top of this post, the Castle has scored a piano. We got it the way we get most things:  somebody we know says, "Know anybody who wants a piano?" And we say, "Is there a piano going begging?" And then we move it. Long about ten-thirty last Saturday morning, I was saying to Aelred, "I'm going to owe you for the rest of our natural lives" -- it was I, of course, who had thought a piano was something we couldn't turn down, while it was he who did the shrugging-in-resignation and also most of the lifting.

It's a big old hulking upright piano, and until Saturday it belonged to a neighbor around the corner who, widowed and  anticipating retirement, has been divesting himself of worldly goods. Fortunately, he had not divested himself of a pickup truck which he was able to back right up, first to his own doorsill, over which it was -- relatively speaking -- no great thing to maneuver a piano, and then to the edge of our front porch, onto which it was -- relatively speaking -- no great thing to maneuver a piano again. Our movers were an impressive lot:  Aelred, Amicus, me (in advisory capacity, mostly), my friend Amy, her two daughters, her father, mother, and two-year-old niece (these latter two also in advisory capacity, mostly), and the man who wanted to get rid of the piano to begin with. In hindsight, it seems miraculous to me that that group of people managed it with no one hurt or killed, and no piano lost overboard in the middle of East Legislature Street, but there it is.

So now we have this piano. Helier likes it for setting up metal soldiers on, and yesterday I discovered all Crispina's dollhouse furniture arranged on its lid. My keyboard skills amount to playing chant melodies with one hand -- up and down the scale, can't go wrong -- while finding artistic-sounding chords to accompany them with the other. Still, I've been able to show H and C the insides of the piano and how it makes sound;  we've started learning the notes on the keyboard, and I demonstrated for them how to play some simple chords. Until my old beginner-piano books show up in the mail, as Grammy has indicated that they will, this will do us.

I suppose I should feed my children something -- not hot dogs -- for breakfast now.

Lenten Vespers I: The First of the Seven Last Words

As in Advent, our parish is praying Sunday Vespers during Lent, with meditations by my husband, who has graciously given permission for me to post them here.

Pray the office.

Meditation:  

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34


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We begin today an exploration of the “seven last words," the seven last sayings of Christ from the Cross. Each Sunday evening we will be concentrating on these sayings as a way to deepen our appreciation of Christ and his Cross, which is the indispensable prelude for our Easter, when it arrives.

The first of the seven last words, to which we attend this afternoon, is from St. Luke’s Gospel: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Jesus’ love streams from the Cross for his persecutors. He pleads their ignorance before the Father, that he might not hold them accountable for the immense wrong that they are committing. It is, of course, in the Divine plan that this event should happen, and that the innocent Christ should suffer at the hands of sinful men. It is in the plan that the world should finally tip its hand, and show itself as the murderous, iniquitous, and God-denying thing that it is. Christ neither asks to be removed from the Cross, nor does he mean by what he says something like, “Wait, this is all a mistake.” Christ only wishes that the mercy he is procuring through his Royal Sacrifice be applied to the ignorant, blasphemous hordes.

The crowds do not know what they are doing, because they are stuck in the worldly mode of operation, unenlightened by the Gospel. They do not know Him whom they are crucifying; they do not glimpse the Divine plan; they have no hope, no light, no mercy. The crowds and crucifiers are the polar opposite of the Christ; they are lost, distracted, and violent.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Was ever Divine mercy shown so fully that God was willing to make himself subject to the darkest side of the human creation-- and, then, plead their cause for a crime and a tragedy without parallel in the history of our race?

Many people had been crucified on the spot where Jesus was crucified. Golgotha, or, the Place of the Skull, was a garbage dump and execution locale outside the city walls of Jerusalem. One surmises that the people who gathered there on that Friday were regular spectators or, in any event, thrill seekers. In any case, Jesus was not the only one to be crucified that day—two criminals were being executed with him. [One of those criminals occasions another of Jesus’ seven sayings. We will examine that locution in due course.] Everyone there that day was taking a part in a drama that the Romans reenacted frequently: the Romans kept the peace by violence--and they despised the public for whom they kept the peace. They were happy to kill the Jews who caused them problems, and they did it early and often. All in the name of ruling for the Pax Romana, the Roman peace; and the Cross was the chosen means of execution—a dreadful, slow death which communicated a stern message to all who beheld it.

No, Jesus’ crucifixion was not unique, but the crucifixion of Jesus was unique—so unique that even Jesus seems not to blame all those who had no inkling as to its significance. How could they tell one man’s blood from another? Or, how could they discriminate between the occasions of crucifixion, besotted with blood as they were? These people could not spot the Divine humility. They could not even begin to think that this grisly drama would be God’s preferred means of redemption for the world. I am not sure that now, 2000 years after the fact, many people understand that the cross is redemption and redemption is through the cross. They are looking for something else:  weight loss or a lottery ticket, a better economy or better skin, a position of privilege or protection from all harm. If we, who are soaked in the story of the cross of Christ cannot get the picture, then how could they? We, however, are without excuse, and we will be held to a higher standard. They are blind from birth, unwitting accomplices to the wild rage of the Devil.

Jesus absolves them from the cross. He is merciful to the last, and he is just and righteous in the face of all unrighteousness.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

That the Father will forgive them is a given. If the Son asks anything of the Father, he will do it, for the Son has denied nothing to the Father, not even obedience unto death. What is to impede the free flow of mercy, now? Nothing. The sacrifice is being made; the world has been defeated. Triumph has been snatched from the defeating jaws of the Devil--violence undone and sin incinerated by the fire of the love of God. On that disgusting dung heap of Calvary, divine purity and glory has been revealed. The world cannot survive this; the mind cannot contain it, nor the human eye spot it for what it is; and the crowds cannot outnumber the mercies streaming forth in the blood of God. They do not know all this, but, then, their day is over, their judgment present, and an almighty mercy holds the keys to the truth about themselves.

No Christian can truly live up to his name who does not realize that the world has been turned inside-out by this Triumph of the Cross. Nor can he be truly happy,  for life in Jesus Crucified is the freshness in all that this passing world has to offer. It is the detachment and the grounding that makes everything once again God’s Gift, and not man’s howling obsession. Isn’t it fitting that Christians greet the spring with the cleansing of the Cross, with the victory beyond all cycles of life and death, and the healing of all wounds?

Jesus Christ does not deny his life even to those who crucify him. He sees his victory clearly and his Sacred Heart yearns for the redemption of every sordid and squalid victimizer gathered at the foot of his Cross, which was, as we now know, a Royal Throne and an Altar of Triumph.

It is amazing to contemplate that Christ would adorn this wicked and passing world, in its most grotesque moment, with the pure love of his heart, and open a portal, wide enough for all mankind to enter into his eternal habitation. The world does not deserve it; we do not deserve it—but God is greater than us, and he has set his love in an eternal shrine for the healing of the nations.

We will enter that portal and come into his eternal home if we are faithful. But because, on our own, we are incapable of being faithful, he will enable us, if we care, even in the least, to be faithful. He will put his life in us, he will feed us with imperishable food; he will administer the medicine of immortality in his Most Holy Sacrament. He will bring us to his Kingdom as surely and as paradoxically as he grants his mercy to his tormenters. So enabled, so enlivened, so disposed to the forgiveness of the Father, we press on this Lent to the prize Jesus has for us: Eternal Life. Let us then worship and adore this Christ, present on the altar, in his Most Holy Sacrament.

Please Continue to Pray

My high-school friend Beth -- as college students we also taught horseback riding together at a girls' summer camp -- is undergoing an experimental treatment for advanced-stage breast cancer. We have not seen each other in at least twenty years, but I am making it my particular project to pray for her this Lent. Though I can't visit her in person, I am writing to her via her Caring Bridge website and offering any little  sacrifice I make on her behalf, for healing, courage, and perseverance in hope -- the large, eternal kind of hope which sees God's goodness even in the midst of suffering,  as well as the hope for a bodily cure.

 She has just finished a tough round of chemotherapy and is resting at the apartment she's rented for the duration of her out-of-state treatment. Insurance is not covering her procedure, and many friends are chipping in to help defray the enormous expense. One friend has flown down to be with her and care for her during the ordeal, which is expected to last for several months.

Anyway, if you're of a mind to add bloggy prayer requests to your intentions, do please remember Beth.

ALSO, notes on grief, hope, and goodness:  Rod Dreher is blogging day-by-day about his sister's devastating cancer diagnosis. A heartbreaking read, but well worth the tears.

More Lenten Ideas for Families and Children

Erika is compiling a link directory here.

Family Stations of the Cross

Every Lent we try to pray the Stations of the Cross regularly in some form at home. One year we processed around our back yard with a candle and a large wooden cross, singing the Stabat Mater to, I imagine, the great interest of our Assemblies of God neighbors. Other years we've just read the Stations. It's always been a squirming, interrupted, argumentative affair -- whose turn to carry the candle? whose turn to carry the cross? whose turn to be, even indoors and in complete privacy, the cringing humiliated adolescent with the weird family? -- but I make us do it, because . . . because . . . well, it's Lent, isn't it? The because should be self-explanatory, and the difficulties, naturally, are part of it.

So the other day I was talking to my friend Jessica about Stations of the Cross with children, and she was a vehicle of inspiration. She has, she said, a set of votive candles with images of the Stations affixed to them somehow;  she said, furthermore, that there was nothing like fire for focusing her children's attention.

Well, I have no special Stations-of-the-Cross votives, but I do have tea lights in abundance. So for the first Friday night in Lent, here's what we did:

1. I cleared the study coffee table of all the schoolday detritus and lined up fourteen tea lights, seven on each side of the table.

2. I procured the following:  a battery-operated camping lantern, a candle snuffer, and a copy of Fr. Lovasik's Stations of the Cross for children.

(Here, also, is a free, printable, pocket-sized Stations booklet. Thanks, Michele.)

3. When everyone was gathered, we lit the candles and turned off all the lights. By the light of the candles and the camping lantern, I read each station aloud, holding up the book so that the lantern's light shone on the picture. At the conclusion of each station, a member of the family took it in turn to snuff a candle, working up one side of the rectangular table and down the other. After the final station, the final candle extinguished, I read aloud the closing prayer, then turned off the lantern so that we could sit in darkness and quiet for a moment before people made their way to bed.

It worked remarkably well. I don't have toddlers who would grab at tea lights on a coffee table;  what I have at the moment are six- and seven-year-olds who need something to center their concentration. This worked. It was remarkably quiet and reverent, and even the most exuberant among us were subdued for the ten minutes it took to pray the stations.

In short, we'll be doing this again.

Clothes and Social Studies, and a Giveaway of Sorts

One of my lovely and delightful real-life friends teaches fourth grade in a little community on the fringes of Fiat, where the high-schoolers call themselves the "Tater-Diggers" and drive tractors to the homecoming game. In the relative quiet of the elementary school, my friend and her fellow teachers operate their own small cash-free economy, at least where clothing is concerned. At some point, I presume, everyone does some actual clothes-shopping in stores, but after a time, the novelty of whatever they've bought  begins inevitably to pall. So they bag it up, bring it to school, and hold a swap-meet. Wah-la, new clothes every three months. What is not to love?

Somebody out there is buying lots of clothes on the front end;  at least, my friend always ends up with bags and bags of things that either don't fit or aren't quite her, and so she brings the overflow to me. This happened just the other night. I went to Mass on Ash Wednesday and came home with a box and a garbage bag, through which  Epiphany and I proceeded to paw with delight. We may be proud in some ways, but not in that one. Clothes are clothes, and we like them. She scored several nice things:  sweaters, mostly, and one of those filmy smock-top things that you wear over something else. I came away with some t-shirts, a soft off-white rayon blouse, and a full skirt of the kind of material which used to be called "sprigged" -- in this case the "sprigs" are tiny pink and white rosebuds and green leaves on a black background. Now I know what I'm wearing for Easter.

Of course, there were also things which didn't fit and/or weren't us. Epiphany retained a large, saggy blue cardigan which she calls  a "Missionary of Charity" sweater, and which she plans to dress up in as a statuesque Mother Teresa next All Saints. I meanwhile have concluded that while the occasional pair of size 12 trousers fits me, mostly size 12 is too big. This is a relief, of course;  on the other hand, some of those pairs of trousers are quite nice. There were a number of dressy tops of the low-in-front variety which I can't ever see myself wearing, and some coordinated stretchy pants sets in flamboyant colors which also weren't quite . . . well, let's just say that I'd rather be decent than conspicuous and leave it at that.

And then there was the striped blouse:  wide stripes of maroon, gold, blue, green, and a sort of taupe on slithery rayon, with long sleeves and a pointed collar. I held it up for Epiphany to inspect.

"Boy," she remarked, "does that say Social Studies."

And it did! That was it exactly. Instantly the vision of my fifth-grade book opened before my eyes;  well, no, it didn't open, exactly. All I could see was the cover, a kind of subtle green pattern in a circa-1975 World-of-Tomorrow-Today motif, with an inset picture, probably of a dam in Kenya.

I can't remember anything about the inside of the book. I'm not sure I knew anything about the inside of the book even when I had it in my possession. Of all my years in Social Studies, until at last, at last, it turned into history and became interesting, I retain only fragments:  Balboa and the Pacific Ocean, Pizarro and the Incas, and a flash of recognition on reading the opening paragraphs of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and learning what sorts of books Eustace liked:  ones "with pictures of grain elevators and fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools."

What was Social Studies, I always wondered. To be sure, it had some history in it, chiefly the Explorers of the New World, who seemed to come up every year, like dreaded houseguests. Oh, no, we all have to pronounce "Moctezuma" and "Tenochtitlan" in unison -- again. But just as the story began to get interesting -- what happened after Moctezuma? (well, everyone went to Peru and turned into Pizarro, and now we have to pronounce Machu Pichu, of course) -- it dissolved into pages of facts about rainfall and population and exports and modern technology and important things happening out there in World-land, while here we sat at our desks in a room in a town where nothing happened, as far as we knew, apparently because the U.N. was too busy someplace else to bother with us. Or we were too boring to be bothered with. And as they say, it is boring people who are bored.

So we folded the striped shirt neatly and laid it back in the box with the things that don't fit. Which reminds me:  before I take things down to the Good Neighbor Shop, there are several items which are nice enough that I'd wear them if they fit, and which I'd gladly pass along to anyone I knew who could use them. Among these are two pairs of extremely nice Ralph Lauren trousers, one in a small navy-and-white houndstooth check and one in a subtle greyish plaid. These are fully lined, well-made -- and too big for me. I think they're size 12, though one might possibly be a 14. I'll have to look again. There are also a few more pairs of similar trousers in the same size range, though not quite as high-quality, also in pinstriped/suiting materials.

I also have four or five sheath-type jumpers in various colors:  light and dark brown, light blue, and denim, I think. They have very deep armholes, so would be useful for nursing, for you mothers out there with  breastfeeding babies. They are quite nice, and again are just too big for me:  size 14, I believe.

There may be more;  I'll have to look. But if anyone out there could use any of these items, please email me:  sallytslc at hotmail dot com. I would be happy to send them to you as a Corporal Work of Mercy for Lent. We're supposed to clothe the naked, and while I'm not going to ask what anyone's literally wearing or not wearing at this moment, I believe this general sort of thing qualifies.

And if you really want the Social Studies shirt, I'll throw that in, too.

A Few Lenten Reruns

 Be advised:  these reposts will not help you and your family to celebrate a holier Lent. I really thought, before I started combing through the archives, that I might have written something inspirational at some point, but no. Still, I'm all in the mood to share, so you'll just have to endure being un-inspired.

Countdown to Lent, February 17, 2007

Thank heavens. From Christmas forward, it's been one big chocolate tsunami around here, with everyone doing his or her strenuousest to get in those requisite five servings a day. This wave crested and broke on Valentine's Day, a romantic holiday which I celebrated with four children and my mother (the object of my romantic sentiment had to teach Ecclesiology and Eschatology for four hours that evening) and, later, in -- how can I put this delicately? -- coming to the aid of one who had taken all the holly-golly a mite too seriously.

So we look forward with joy to our approaching austerities. For as long as I have known him, my husband has observed a sober Lent by giving up alcohol, coffee, and chocolate, and for years I used to tell people that my own discipline was to survive forty days with a person who had renounced all the crutches of a civilized existence. But then I "caught the spirit," as the old Methodist bumper stickers used to tell us to do -- which made the Paraclete sound like a strain of influenza, we always thought, but never mind. I used not to like Lent, particularly, but now I couldn't do without it. That's not to say that I do it all that well, being of a disposition which proposes great things and then has to sit down and drink a glass of water and think. One Lent, I proposed to write all the thank-you notes I hadn't written that year. I spent the entire six weeks thinking how to couch "thank you for whatever you gave me a year ago Christmas" in diplomatic terms, and got nowhere, probably because there just ISN'T any diplomatic way to express that piquant mix of remorse and excuse, and so my resolve imploded. I'm not sure I wrote even one; assuredly my character was in no way improved, and I had no sacrifice to offer up, aside from a little withering self-knowledge.

One year -- the best Lent of my life to date -- I wrote sonnets. The idea came to me that I would write one sonnet a day for the entire forty days. Of course, I quickly dropped Sundays, because they were feast days, and Holy Week went by the wayside because I was in church pretty much the entire time, but in total, I think I wrote 37 sonnets, of which maybe five were any good at all. Now, as disciplines go, this wasn't an especially spiritual one. It wasn't like making a set of sacrifice beads, or putting a little plastic Crucifix on the family altar whenever you do a good deed for Christ. I hadn't arrived at a point of thinking in those terms at all. But I had arrived at a point of thinking I had to choose some kind of serious discipline and actually DO it, and I thought I might learn something by writing sonnets.

There is a lesson of a spiritual nature in having to think in such a compressed form, fourteen lines in pentameter, with a strict rhyme scheme. You have to pare and clarify -- you can't waste three lines describing the wart on your toe, because then you've got only eleven lines left in which to make some point about it. You can conclude in leisurely fashion, in a Petrarchan sestet, or you can push things to the twelfth line, and then pound home some truth in a Shakespearean couplet. But you have to finish the thing off which you have started, and that's not easy in that few lines. Look how long it takes me to get to any point ordinarily, and you have an idea of the difficulty.

There's also a discipline gained by simply knowing that by the end of the day you must have spat out fourteen pentameter lines in Petrarchan or Elizabethan form, about SOMETHING. One thing that you learn is that it's possible, really, to write fourteen pentameter lines in Petrarchan or Elizabethan form about pretty much anything your eye happens to fall upon. Not GOOD pentameter lines in Petrarchan or Elizabethan form, mind you, but that's not the point. Or maybe that is the point. It's very humbling to write what you know full well is fourteen lines of drivel, and to know that there's nothing you can do to make it any better. Taking some perfectly good detail of God's creation -- a birthmark, say, or rain on the window -- and turning it into fourteen lines of complete and utter rot is like . . . well, it's kind of like doing the Fall all over again, in miniature. The artist likes to feel like God, of course, but the reality is that the great majority of the time, we're the spoilers, the minor-league dark angels who blot and smudge the perfect landscape, or reduce it to tripe with one act of the mind. And if at the end of the day that doesn't make you understand why somebody else needed to take the repair business in hand, then you're probably not thinking about Lent anyway.

A little handful of sonnets from that Lent turned out all right. The really egregious ones were probably better for my soul.

Laissez Les Bon Temps . . . Whatever:  More February 2007, When the Big Kids Were in a Children's Theatre Production of The King and I, and All Was Chaos, Not That That's Anything to Write Home About, Necessarily.

Well, we had a distinctly exciting Mardi Gras around here. The little kids got up and had hardboiled eggs for breakfast -- one of my favorite breakfasts, because all you do is put the eggs in the water, turn on the burner, and forget the whole thing until some little voice says, "Am I going to have an egg today?" And then you prise them off the blackened bottom of the pan, and there you are. No tiresome pouring of cereal and quibbling with people about whether or not Cheerios need sugar (me: no. the rest of the known world, apparently, to hear my family tell it: yes, lots); no oatmeal boiling over onto the pyrex carousel in the microwave and then the brown sugar MELTING before the consumer has a chance to look at it, let alone consume it, which of course leads a certain consumer demographic to disbelieve that you ever put sugar on it to begin with and to wail for more, when you didn't ever WANT to put sugar on it to begin with, because what's WRONG with the taste of oats, for heaven's sake -- horses like them. Eggs, on the other hand -- or "egg's," as my husband likes to write it, with the quotation marks, because he saw it written that way on a sign once long ago and has cherished the memory -- are straightforward, if friable. I am speaking of the yolk. Nobody in my house eats the yolk. They all prefer to crumble it up and spread it on the floor under the chair.

I can't wait for the series to appear -- of course, it will appear in 2307, and I won't be here to see it -- on life in the "Postmodern House." You know, they've had those series about Victorian houses and pioneer homesteads and all kinds of habitats which otherwise, I guess, rational people sign their lives away, and the lives of their nearest and dearest, to inhabit for six wretched months. So one day you're lying on the divan reading Trollope and thinking idly to yourself that it would have been fun to have lived then, and the next day you're up at five to blot the walls with biscuit dough because that's how they got the soot off, while your children -- now appearing as a chimney sweep and Eliza Dolittle -- have called the nursing home to book your bed in advance. The image of some hapless person in 2307 confronting a microwave and trying to figure out what the button marked "popcorn" refers to, or how exactly "warm" differs from "defrost," or why the track lighting spotlights various random cobwebby corners of the room but not the place where the cookbook is spread out waiting to be read -- well, someone will be entertained, I'm sure.

The big kids wandered in around ten. This theatrical lifestyle we lead is telling on us; the days get later and later. They poured their own tiresome cereal, and I tactfully looked the other way so as not to see whether they put sugar on or not, and afterwards we said the rosary, all five Glorious Mysteries, which we then put away with all our alleluias for Lent. We didn't LITERALLY put away any alleluias, as friends of ours did, making a huge banner and then hiding it, to be brought out at Easter. I thought about making some alleluia cards and having the little kids color them and everyone hide them, but by the time we finished the rosary it was nearly eleven, so we contented ourselves with singing "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones" and belting out the alleluias, and then some people had schoolwork to do. While they did it, the 3-year-old and I went to the grocery store and bought lunch. We had both play and choir practice on the calendar for tonight, so I figured that if we were going to do any kind of a Shrove Tuesday dinner, we'd have to do it at lunch. And as it was almost noon already by the time we got to the store, the 3-year-old and I made the executive decision to have frozen waffles instead of pancakes, and also sausages. And Mardi Gras cupcakes, because there they were, and tomorrow begins the Great Abstemiousness. Of course, if we'd waited and bought them tomorrow they'd have been marked way down . . . and we could have bought Valentine's candy today for practically nothing. But it was Mardi Gras. We splashed out for the good stuff, or at least for the yellow, purple and green stuff. This was the 3-year-old's executive decision (also that she would get a cupcake with a purple plastic "mask" decoration on it, because there weren't any pink ones), and she was standing by it.

Fast-forward through the afternoon, which was packed as usual with treble choir and ballet, and the evening, which featured chicken nuggets eaten standing around in the kitchen (but without sugar on) and then off to choir (me) and play practice (everyone else). Afterwards, the teenager reported with annoyance that the "quiet room" at play practice isn't. She had been trying to read The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the general atmosphere had not been accommodating. The 9-year-old meanwhile had gone to the "loud room," which apparently was, and played Go Fish all evening. Nice to know that two hours of his young life did not go to waste.

On rereading, I see that I should clarify that we did NOT put our rosaries away for Lent, just the Glorious Mysteries. I have an idea that we'll say the Divine Mercy chaplet on Fridays, maybe. It would be good to learn it, and Lent, like Advent, is such a good season for introducing things. I suggested to the teenager that she make us some Stations of the Cross as an art project, because she'd been all jazzed by the idea of designing vestments and a baptismal font, as assigned in the high school art elective she's contemplating. So I suggested this, and she sighed and said remorsefully, "It sounds so boring when you say it." So I'm just not saying it any more.

A Year With God

I've just splurged on a resource I've wanted for a long time -- another big-ticket item ($58.95) like High School of Your Dreams! but with, thank goodness, a better title. A Year With God is another offering from Catholic Heritage Curricula, whose materials I like generally. (not a sponsored link, by the way) I haven't used that much of their curriculum, because we don't use much organized, packaged curriculum per se, but High School of Your Dreams is proving indispensible, Little Stories for Little Folks, which we just got, looks like a good basic phonics program, albeit with another sort of teeth-twinging title; and A Year With God is one of those finds that I'm already wondering how I ever lived without.


(Okay, truthfully? This was three years ago. I used AYWG a lot -- that year. And we didn't wind up using Little Stories so much, either. I do think I'm going to pull out AYWG this year, though, for some needed revving of the ol' domestic-church engines)

Living the liturgical year has been important to us for some time now (essentially as long as we've had children at all), and I'm always on the lookout for resources to help us do that. Last year we bought a  Lent-to-Easter guide (also not sponsored) which was very good -- we did the Seder dinner out of it for Holy Thursday and hope to make that a yearly tradition (anyone want to come for dinner on Holy Thursday?). I need to dig that one up again -- I can't remember where I put it once Easter was over . . .

In the meantime, A Year With God is full of good ideas. What I really like is that many of the ideas are aimed at younger children, who have trouble sitting through a Seder dinner, say, or not cutting up at a Stations of the Cross at church. I so often find that I drag the little kids to things, thinking that they'll get something out of the experience, and it's so often a failure, because they're little kids, and act like little kids, and we end up impatient and out of charity with each other, which is not exactly what I ever WANT to get out of experiences. I did this to the big kids, too, when they were little, so it's not like I ever learn anything. Anyway, in A Year With God, Lenten activities range from making a home-made Mass book to spring cleaning: "to 'clean out the cobwebs' of our souls." It is so lovely, on every level, to have a clean house for Easter. You can also imitate Saint Therese of Lisieux by doing "little acts of love for God," even making a set of Sacrifice Beads. The teenager just watched the movie Therese and is primed to read The Story of a Soul, so clearly the next logical step is to put her "Little Way" into practice . . .




(sponsored)

I particularly like the template for Good Friday for a family with little children who can't sit through hours of church:

"At noon on Good Friday, our children help prepare a simple lunch, such as soup with unleavened bread (tortillas or pita pockets) or Hot Cross Buns and cheese. From noon to three o'clock we maintain silence as much as possible. If childen are too young to benefit from Church services, we do spiritual reading or view the video 'Jesus of Nazareth' (Zefirelli). We pray the Stations of the Cross outdoors and/or have a simple veneration of the Cross ceremony at three o'clock."

Here's another Holy Week idea:

"Create your own mini garden! On a tray place moss and flowers, tiny pebbles and gravel, and perhaps a saucer of water (or a mirror) as a lake. In a corner of the garden create a mound; on it place three crosses, which can be made simply from twigs. With skill, a tomb can be made from pebbles stuck to cardboard. Be sure to include a stone that can be rolled aside on Easter morning."

It strikes me that you could make some parallel with the practice of decorating the Altar of Repose as a garden and keeping vigil through the night. Obviously you can't have a literal Altar of Repose at home, but this could resonate interestingly for older children with the events of the Holy Thursday Mass and Stripping of the Altar, while for younger children who can't make it through the service, it could serve as a foretaste. Maybe older children could commit to "watch and pray" alone with the "garden" -- a dining room can become a quiet prayer chapel, especially in the evening when little children have gone to bed.

Other suggested practices include making a weekly resolution for each week in Lent: this week, offering your hands in service to Jesus, doing one act of kindness a day without being asked; next week, seeking out anyone who has hurt you and doing that person a kindness; the next week, helping someone who needs your compassion; the next, making a point of saying something kind to someone every day; and so forth.

What I particularly like about A Year With God is that the suggestions mix the creative with the practical, the ambitious with the quietly do-able, and "good for older children" with "possible for younger children." So many other resources I've seen, or ideas I've had on my own, have been aimed at one age group or the other, being either too far-reaching or cerebral for the little children, or too babyish for the older ones. So this book is a Godsend for our family, with our wide gaps in ages, or for any large family with children in every age group. This also means that even with one child, you could use this resource for years and years and not exhaust the possibilities.

The teenager has just put her head in to remind me that it's about rosary time. It's Presidents' Day, so we're not doing much school -- the 9-year-old and the 4-year-old are going swimming with the Cub Scouts, and the teenager is making movie plans with her friend Tessy, and the 3-year-old and I, after we drop the big girls at the movie, are going to go have a chai latte and a goodie and a good time being together. 

So, maybe that's kind of inspirational, sort of? I do feel a little inspired to take the former 3-year-old out for some kind of goodie, but since it's Lent, I guess we'll have to wait -- if it's going to involve coffee, at any rate. No chai lattes in Fiat, alas alas.

Ash Wednesday

Time is short right now. We have school to do in just a bit. But while we're fasting, I thought I'd serve up a few snacks-which-do-not-add-up-to-a-full-meal.

An Ash-Wednesday sonnet, from Lent ten years ago, when my discipline was to write a sonnet every day. This was during a time of, essentially, unbelief:  though I had always been a churchgoer, it had not yet occurred to me that the beauty I craved also demanded obedience. In short, I went through the motions, did what I wanted, staked out my territory inside whose boundaries God was not invited to step, and was not happy.  That Lent, for various reasons, was actually a very dark time. In hindsight, this set of sonnets, most of which are very bad, though a few turned out all right, represented a step I had never exactly taken before, in the direction of listening to something outside myself -- the form, which I received from tradition -- and letting it order my world for me,  in a strict and serious way.

Charles Causley's sobering Ash Wednesday poem, "Jack O'Lent."  

From the frontispiece of my copy of the Saint Augustine's Prayer Book: A Book of Devotion for Members of the Episcopal Church (Revised Edition)
: 

Remember, Christian Soul 
That thou has this day, and every day of thy life, 
God to glorify.
Jesus to imitate.
A soul to save.
A body to mortify.
Sins to repent of.
Virtues to acquire.
Hell to avoid.
Heaven to gain.
Eternity to prepare for.
Time to profit by.
Neighbors to edify.
The world to despise.
Devils to combat.
Passions to subdue.
Death, perhaps, to suffer.
Judgment to undergo.

The section on penance and examination of conscience in this prayer book is excellent, by the way, and is the form which I have most frequently used. The examen follows the model of cardinal sins and virtues and encourages the self-examiner to dig quite deeply to prepare for a good confession. It's very rigorous, and I highly recommend it for Lent or any other time. And yes, that is a sponsored link, but rest assured that I'd have written this anyway. At any rate, I think I'll copy out the reminder to my soul and paste it to the wall above my desk.

Finally, if you are planning to make the Stations of the Cross a part of your Lenten devotions, you might be interested in this book of meditations, which my theologian husband wrote last year. It's hard to imagine anything better than the meditations of St. Alphonsus Liguori, which doubtless most of us use. Still, these are beautiful, if I do say so my own unbiased self. This year he's also recorded the meditations on CD. So if you're interested, there they are. Obviously I have a vested interest in this, but it's a gorgeous little book, and I'm no end of pleased to see it. (Besides, he included my truly-favorite Charles Causley poem)

So  now I'm going to say prayers and do some sober Lenten schooling with the wild things, and this evening we'll go receive the ashes on our foreheads.

Qui meditabitur in lege Domini die ac nocte, dabit fructum suum in tempore suo.

Another 45 Minutes, and the Frivolity is OVER

And if you want to lend some added focus to your fasting and sacrifice tomorrow and in the days to come, please consider praying and offering your hardships, great or small, for my friend Beth, currently in heavy-duty treatment for cancer. She will be in hospital for the next six weeks.

Thanks very much. A holy Ash Wednesday to you all.

Pre-Lenten Frivolities #3

No more Mr. Cholmondley-Warner. No no no. We'll be having none of that. No laugh tracks. Stop it right now. I mean, right tomorrow. Stop it.

Pre-Lenten Frivolities #2

The approach of Lent always gives me a creeping back-of-the-neck feeling that the world is about to come to an end. Now that I think of it, I actually feel that way more or less all the time -- find me a mood ring with a color indicating "impending doom," and I will be a happy gloomy camper -- but today I awoke with a heightened sense of needing to cross things off the list before the entire eastern United States falls off into the sea or is inundated by a sudden glacier, thus precipitating the coinage of the phrase "with glacial suddenness." See what a pass we have come to around here?

So I took the dog to the vet. I mean, if you want to feel as though you've crossed something off, let me recommend hauling an ordinarily-mild-mannered 60-pound dog into an examination room and watching him object to the vet tech's attempts to lift him onto the examination table. Follow this with wrestling a muzzle onto said dog while the children you ill-advisedly brought with you -- because the vet is a field trip, right?  -- try to outdo each other in chatting up the aforementioned vet tech with stories about this dog's epic drooling. Then write a check for $200.

So now the dog is passed out like a dead thing on the rug at my feet, and here I am. The French press cracked this morning, so I can't make coffee, even as the sand rushes out of the great cosmic hourglass and the day of the Lord is at hand, great and exceeding bitter. Howl, ye shepherds, indeed.

Pre-Lenten Frivolities #1

1. Vanity. Thinking about hair. Thinking about frugal hair care tips.Thinking about the pictures Epiphany and I took of various beautiful feminine hairdos which she created and then didn't enter in a blog contest, and which I have been meaning to upload on the other computer and post here, but haven't.

2. Procrastination. Get it over with before the deadline. Or, you know, put it off until the deadline. Whatever.

3. Facebook. Brr. I wasn't going to give it up for Lent, but maybe I will. Forever.  (this blog spends way more time there than I do, anyway).


4. Coffee. Drink a lot! I think I had six cups today. I might have several more before bed. Who cares if I can't sleep now? I'll be passed out at the breakfast table Wednesday morning. Amicus, big-hearted sadist that he is, bought his father a whole bag of the Mystic Monks' Cowboy Coffee blend for Valentine's. Hm, I'm smelling it even now, and my hand has sort of stopped shaking. Time for more.



It is really very very good, as I believe my friend Pentimento more or less said not long ago. And maybe, unlike me, you're not giving it up for Lent, in which case you probably need to stock up. Fortified for forty days, and all that. (and yes, I could conceivably get paid twelve cents for saying that, but Pentimento is right. It is really very very good.)

5. Chocolate. Not that I'm eating any. Much. I put the dark-chocolate Dove bites Aelred gave me for Valentine's at the back of the freezer, and I can report that if today's performances are any indication I really am willing to break my teeth along with my, um, abstinence from things like dark chocolate and all flour-based products. I think I should get some kind of credit for that.

6. Loud music that I listened to in high school with my friend David, who drove me around lots of Friday nights in his baby-blue '68 Chevy Malibu with the air filter turned upside-down, because that made the engine sound like a plane taking off, which we thought was hilarious no matter how many times we did it. Once when I was studying for an exam, he and a bunch of other guys turned up, wearing disguises, on my front doorstep, where they tried to sell my mother, who wouldn't let me out to see them, a big plastic plant which appeared to have been borrowed from a dentist's waiting room. She was afraid I'd grow up and marry one of them, but I didn't.

Anyway, giving up nostalgia and turning the radio down -- Wednesday.

7. Nothing-y blog posts like this one, designed -- and I use that term loosely -- to take up space, because I try to make a discipline of writing some kind of blog thing every day. The difference, I hope, will be that in Lent I'll actually think about what I'm writing before it falls off the tips of my fingers and onto the screen.

You were wanting some kind of real Lenten preparation? Go visit Karen, who's done an impressive job of pulling together a series of posts-from-the-past on various inspired ways to observe a holy Lent. I fully intend to do this -- observe the holy Lent, I mean, not visit Karen, which I can't very well mean to do when I've already done it. But I'll probably visit her again, too. In the meantime, I have a little more minor-league carousing to do so that, when I wake up day after tomorrow, I'll notice the difference right away.

Valentine: Let Me Bring You Songs From the Wood . . .

Lest anyone think we're all high-culcher around here, and listen to absolutely nothing but Gregorian chant all the livelong day . . .



Actually, my high-school obsession with Jethro Tull probably goes a long way towards explaining my current love for medieval English music, which might in some convoluted way explain the yen for Gregorian chant . . .

And I think it's rather endearing than otherwise to find your erstwhile wild-haired idol talking about his deep-vein-thrombosis and posing in support hose.  I mean, so go we all, one way or another, which may be a good if roundabout to say I love you to my real-life Valentine, with whom I celebrate a significant anniversary next month.  This is what the romance is about,  after all:   sickness and health, health and sickness, till the door closes between us, final only for a time. That, and maybe some chocolate, too, now and then.

So, Aelred:  not that I've been anywhere to speak of, but it's good to be back home with you all the same.

Overheard

Boy 1:  Who drew a mustache on my Pokemon card??

Boy 2:  Well, I did it with your pen.

A Friday-Poetry Valentine: John Frederick Nims

People are jumping up and down here, because Valentine's falls before Lent, and they can eat up all their chocolate on the day. In fact, they'll just about have to. Anyway . . .

Love Poem


My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home;  deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before red apoplectic streetcars --
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

. . .

Read the rest.

This Week's Reading and Study Highlights

Epiphany:  The Venerable Bede, in Latin. Her class just finished translating the story of Caedmon. Otherwise she's rereading Who Gets the Drumstick (the Yours, Mine, and Ours story) for the tenth time since we got the book last month.


Amicus:  A condensed version of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. I didn't know we had it;  I'm putting it on E's reading list for economics. Ours is the version displayed here, only not a vintage edition, and surely not this expensive.




Helier: An Usborne retelling of stories from the Trojan War. Not great prose, but he's also not quite ready to tackle Padraic Colum on his own.





Crispina: Good old Dick and Jane. A year ago Helier was working his way through it;  when she despairs of being able to "really read" on her own, I point at him, poring over a book, and remind her that where she is, he and the others also once were.




Other school highlights: 


Epiphany:  Scarlet Letter essay revision. She's written a first draft, and for a revision exercise I've had her rewrite her thesis sentence and make an outline, organizing the writing she's already gotten onto the page. For certain writers, this approach makes more sense than the outline-first-then-write strategy.



Meanwhile, in ballroom dance they're learning the foxtrot, and she and Gemma are going to the college's Valentine's swing dance Saturday night.


Amicus: On the other hand, some people benefit from learning outlining. I'm teaching him the formal outline as a way of illustrating how one can offer a more complete and reasoned answer to an open-ended question than simply a dashed-off "truth is self-evident" sentence. In reviewing his history chapter the other day, we worked through one discussion-type question by writing an outline on the table together;  then he did another on his own. I hadn't thought about it that much before, but this seems a reasonable and appropriate thinking-skill to teach a middle-schooler, at the dialectical stage of the trivium. You're teaching answer as argument, ie making a case for something's being the right answer, without the burden of a lot of rhetoric. I'm not a strict adherent to the classical method, but I do think these stages make a lot of sense. For this student, at least, I think I'm far likely to get a more thoughtful, less hair-tearing result if I don't say, "Go write me a page about X."


Helier: More review of multi-digit addition.

Crispina:   Skip-counting by 5 and 10. First foray into actual addition problems. I'm having her use dice to solve them until she can rattle off the facts without having to count.

H&C together:  More sentence-building, using our plastic word tiles. Using the sentences we create as copywork, so that they get writing and spelling practice.

And now we're off for our Latin day.

(and as you know, the book links are sponsored and generate a few pennies for us)

"Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, That's Timmy's Rule." Woof! Woof!

Four children and a dog, a caravan, an unfriendly lot of circus folk camping in the same field. A lonely moor, and gypsies up to no good. A bicycling trip with kidnappers!

"You know," Epiphany observed at eight or nine, deep in our first round of Enid Blyton mania, "these are all stories about unsupervised children. What are their parents thinking?"

Yes, yes, by all means, take the bicycles and go. Mother and I will be away at a scientists' meeting, out of reach of the telephone. In fact we'll leave you no contact information whatsoever. Good luck, kids. You're on your own.

That's what their parents appear to be thinking. At least, those are the thoughts they voice. And so the Famous Five set off -- Julian, Dick, Anne, George, and Timmy the canine companion, guaranteed to inspire a ne'er-do-well to growl, "Call off that vicious brute, or I will do something terrible to him, that I will!" -- into some lonely quarter of the English countryside, where villains of one kind or another lie in wait.

In the course of a long career, Enid Blyton cranked out an astonishing number of books for children:  the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the adventures of Little Noddy in Toyland. If they are formulaic -- I can't bear to read them aloud any more, to my younger children's chagrin;  you're on your own, kids -- their appeal to children manifestly lies in the ingredients of that formula:  friends, dogs, danger and no grownups. Well, that doesn't really explain Noddy. But it's why, as soon as she was reading fluently, Epiphany devoured installment after installment of the Famous Five's exploits. We picked them up by the stack in charity shops along the Mill Road in Cambridge, to be plowed through and left in dusty slithering piles around our flat. That they were predictable didn't bother her in the least;  perhaps it was part of the  charm. A good bedtime story, after all, has to be both a cliffhanger and, somehow, comforting enough that the listener does not lie rigidly awake for hours after the lights go out.

Now, we are almost certainly not the British-colonial demographic meant by this article , which explores the popularity of Blyton's books in places like Sri Lanka. But even while we lived in England, my children had a similar foreigners' fascination with the lush landscapes where Blyton's adventures unfold, which now that I think about it must seem almost as alien to children in East Anglia as to children in Australia, or North Carolina. Our family's chief observation about English stories is that the children always seem to eat a lot, and that whatever they're eating, even if it's tinned corned beef or tongue sandwiches, sounds unspeakably wonderful and makes us hungry, too, even when we haven't been pony-trekking.

Amy Rosenberg's piece covers extensive and interesting ground in examining Blyton's impact on readers who inherited her with their cricket. This observation, for example, struck home with me:

But for Mishra, the repercussions of such discoveries were not entirely beneficial. “I think ultimately, reading Blyton’s books – and the more mature versions of fantasy that I sought out afterwards, like Agatha Christie – had a harmful effect; it delayed my progression as a writer. I didn’t think of books as anything I could write, or anything that could be written about the people I knew.” Other writers voice a similar sense of setback. In a talk at Harvard in 2007, Adichie talked about growing up consuming Blyton’s tales of gallivanting white children. As a result, she said, it wasn’t until she countered Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that she realised novelists could write about black people too.

Kirsty Murray, a young-adult novelist from Melbourne, Australia, also felt stymied. “My problem with the British / European landscapes in Blyton’s work,” she says, “ is they had colonised my imagination so effectively that I felt nothing interesting could possibly happen in an Australian setting. Our ragged, sun-baked landscapes were so in contrast to Cherry Tree Farm, and our dry creeks so lustreless beside the babbling brooks of Blyton’s England, that I felt self-conscious about my country’s lack of twee charm.”

I've often wondered, as an American formed largely by British literature, about  my own country's relatively shallow mythological strata. Could a culture like ours produce a Lord of the Rings, for example? We are an end-product of Western Civilization, yet we're worlds away, geographically at least, from the ancient stones our imaginations -- some of them, anyway -- still tread. That's a tangential question, and an American's relationship with British writing is to a great extent going to be different from that of an African. Still, it's an interesting thing to raise:  the ways in which the very cultural food we're fed might render our own landscapes imaginatively barren, because they're not the right ones. As a child I used to go looking among the trees of my backyard for a way into Narnia;  at the same time, I instinctively felt that I was looking in the wrong place altogether.

At any rate . . . I hate to leave this hanging, but it's school time, and there's a naked Barbie sitting on the edge of my desk waiting to have her head stuck back on. Enid will have to wait till later.



ADDENDUM:  Of course, Blyton is hardly great literature, but the general danger in carving up story  into culturally-digestible portions ("black" literature for black people, for example) is in missing out on the ways in which truly great literature -- The Iliad, say, or King Lear -- frames our own experience in terms of larger truths, and pushes the borders of our particular landscape farther towards a common horizon.

FW: FW: FW: Could You Pass This College Pop-Quiz From 2010???

FROM:  mwxhub@tempomail.com
SENT:  Tues 2/08/2110
TO:  Undisclosed Recipients

 ths s gr8 ul laff xxoo

Quiz
Thursday, February 4, 2010
TH 205

1) According to the syllabus, the course in which you are currently enrolled is called _________.


(okay, Aelred gave this quiz last week, and the rest of it is actual questions about course content. But #1 did make me laff. Where are you right now? A month into the semester, have you glanced at the syllabus yet?

The question, as he originally wrote it, was multiple-choice;  put the letters together and I think they spell "despair."

On second thought, maybe I'm not laffing so much.)

Robert Louis Rabbit-Trail

1. Read The Black Arrow aloud.


2. Realize that the subtitle, "A Tale of Two Roses," makes less than no sense to your target demographic, ages 7 and 6, never mind references to "Harry Fift/Sixt."

3. Read aloud the chapters on the Hundred Years War and Agincourt in The Oxford Children's History, Volume 1: Earliest Times to the Last Stuarts
. This explains old Nick Appleyard and his glory days, and everyone now knows who the Harries are.

4. But it still doesn't quite give you the dates for the Wars of the Roses, or a detailed history thereof.  Not that you want that detailed a history; remember, your target demographic are 6 and 7 years old. Remember also that you've just inherited a set of World Book Encyclopedias, of the 1975 vintage, and while older persons in your household have availed themselves of this goldmine of -- fortunately -- mostly timeless information, the 6- and 7-year-olds have less than no clue how to use them.

5. Stand with your target demographic before the dining-room cabinet containing said volumes. Ask the target demographic what they notice about the spines of the volumes. Right! They're numbered, and they also have letters on them. And if you wanted to read something about England, you ask them, which volume do you think you'd choose?

Once settled on the E-volume, proceed to leaf through it, explaining that E is not the only letter in "England." So you find the En's, the Eng's, the Engl's . . . aha! Flip past the photograph of circa-1975 Coventry -- hey, observes a member of the target demographic, they have, like, sort of modern cities there -- to the page with the little information-box containing a listing of the rulers of England from Saxon times.

Discover that Henry VI reigned from 1422-1461 -- not really awful innings for the infant and feeble-minded, though hardly a golden age. Write down these dates in your timeline book, and those of Edward IV, and those of Henry VI again, even though it's only a paltry year, and then those of Edward VI, and so on through Richard III and the poor little princes in the Tower and the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and then the target demographic has heard of Henry VIII and divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived, and you're on something like solid ground in trying to imagine when, exactly, The Black Arrow is taking place, and why Sir Daniel keeps riding to war as soon as ever he determines which side is winning.

And then, in exhaustion, do some math.

(Of course those are sponsored links. But you knew that.)

But I Through the Greatness of Your Love Have Access to Your House: Saint Josephine Bakhita

 

Born in Darfur around 1869, captured by slavers as a child, sold, resold and brutally treated, she came to know the Master above all other masters, the good Master who knew her, loved her, and suffered with her as she herself had suffered.  In the  encyclical Spe Salvi (saved by hope) Pope Benedict XVI writes of St. Josephine: 

Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a “paron” above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme “Paron”, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her “at the Father's right hand”. Now she had “hope” —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge of this hope she was “redeemed”, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.  H/T

In the February gloom, St. Josephine, of your goodness do more than pray for us:  hope for us.

Read more about her life.

No-Flour Oatmeal Fritters

Lately I've been toying with cutting flour and processed sugar from my diet (and there was great familial rejoicing. not.). Over the last three years or so, about twenty-five pounds have crept up on me from out of nowhere and attached themselves to my person, and while I don't want to lose all of it -- I was really skinny before, and I don't need to be that skinny again -- I'd like to shed some. Used to be that I could skip lunch two or three days in a row and go for a walk, and that would do it, but no more, it seems. I have to make some effort. I so dislike effort, but it's probably good for my soul, so there we are. 

I also have to have some small and manageable place to start. This conversation motivated me, but being the kind of person who hits overload way too quickly, I have to think in terms of one simple recipe, one meal at a time.

The no-flour thing is a toughie;  we're a family who naturally subsist on pasta, biscuits, rolls, muffins, bread bread bread, all bread all the time. Dinner isn't dinner without some kind of bready thing. So tonight I experimented with oatmeal, to see if I couldn't make something with it, but with no flour, that didn't just fall apart. Here, with all the precise measurement details you've come to expect from me, is what I did:

1. Dumped a bunch of quick-variety oatmeal in a bowl. I don't know, about half a mixing bowl?

2. Poured skim milk over the oats to cover them without having them absolutely swimming, and left that to soak for five or ten minutes while I worked on other parts of dinner.

3. Added a splodge of molasses, maybe a quarter-cup? That's probably cheating on the sugar, though molasses isn't white sugar and does impart a measure of iron to whatever you're putting it in. So there. Besides, while I want to cook and eat more healthfully, I have no particular desire to consume, or to make other people consume, cardboard.

4. Beat in two eggs to hold things together.

The resulting mixture was about the consistency of pancake batter. If I'd added less milk, I could have make scone-type things that I formed into cakes with my hands and baked. As it was, what I did was to melt a tiny smidge of butter on my griddle, pour circles of the batter on, and make pancake/fritter things. They cooked up nicely and were delicious even plain -- the rest of the family ate theirs with butter, jam, and honey, but the oaty texture and the faint sweetness of the molasses tasted fine on their own.

I don't know whether this sort of thing counts for anything in the low-carby universe, but it did prove to me that I could produce a bread-like thing without the use of any processed carbohydrate product. And oats are awfully good for you. And the exclamations of delight around the dinner table were such that I'd make these again, regardless -- if only I could remember how I made them, which is really why I've bothered writing this post at all.

P.S. I hate the word "diet," and I think there's hardly anything more boring in all the world than the numbers on the scale, unless it's the sound of myself talking about the numbers on the scale. So believe me, if you are bored by this, I will not hold it against you.

Because Everyone Knows Why People Watch the Super Bowl

New Today at Associated Content

The second part of my little series on the sonnet,  Sonnet-Writing Made Simple,  is up today. You can read the first part here.

Many, many thanks to all our readers who have taken the time to glance at articles there. The deal is pay-per-view, and while it's not big bucks, every little bit adds up. Two dollars here, two dollars there:  it goes to pay for things like driver's ed and Scout camp and groceries. Very few writers make really prosperous livings doing what they do;  many, many writers make no kind of living at all. To be able to provide even small things for my family by doing the one thing I'm actually competent at doing and enjoy is a great blessing, and we are all very grateful.

A Propos of Nothing Except the Half-Credit of Economics We Have to Complete by Next Year

Keynes v. Hayek: not a bad place to start.

Bad-Weather Reading

Yesterday the rain bucketed dismally down all day;  today we have one of those white-sky-spitting-snow-through-wet-barren-branches things going on. The dog was weeping at the door to be let out, but I had to knee him in the behind to get him through it, and now he's standing on the back porch announcing in piteous tones that he's changed his mind and can hold it for several more hours or until we get to Florida, whichever comes first.

I can't say that I blame him all that much. I don't want to go out, either. Not one bit. I have done my glorious walking in falling snow, and now I am finished with that -- at least I'm finished enjoying it to the fullest extent of the law. After all, this is the South, where we have winter for fifteen minutes and then the daffodils bloom. Two weekends in a row of snow, even of the snivelling half-hearted un-sticking variety, are an aberration.

The good thing about this kind of weather, of course, is that it's good for reading. This is one Saturday when the push mower in the garage cannot reproach me with its idleness, and  I've assigned all the indoor chores to the kids.  I actually first typed "kindoor chores," which seems to me an apt name for my great goal in life at the moment, which is to transform all my offspring large and small into a crackerjack housekeeping staff while I -- read.

But what to read? James Kidd at The Independent offers this rundown of gloomy, pessimistic, even despairing fiction for which, he says, the English winter weather is made:  Melville, Hemingway, William Golding, Orwell, Achebe, Nevil Shute, and above all, Cormac McCarthy, author of Blood Meridian,  No Country for Old Men and The Road.

I dunno. Apocalyptic might do it for some people today, but if things got any darker in my world I think I might want to drown myself. Not that things are generally dark in my world, beyond the weather;  I'm just very susceptible. So I'm going on reading Alice Thomas Ellis's Home Life Three, which Jody very kindly sent me in the mail last week, after I'd happened to mention, utterly in passing and with no thought of gain, that I owned volumes One, Two and Four, but not Three. Maybe I should do some more work for the man. One good turn, &c.

But not today. Today I'm wrapping myself up with stuff like this:

Just before I woke up this morning, I was thinking in my sleep. What I was thinking was that February is like a strip of damp drugget laid in a narrow aisle, and one is oneself like a boiled egg being pushed along by the toe of the curate. Someone awakened me with a cup of tea in time for me to grab the edges of this curious reflection and scrutinize it closely. Discount the Freudian connotations. What it means is that February is a nothing month, a means only to arriving in a (we hope) more clement seasons:  the altar of May, we could say if we wished to wax poetic. I don't know what the curate was doing there, except that somewhere in the English unconscious the curate and the egg are inseparable.

Quite right, too, all of it, though I'm not prepared to speak for the English unconscious. February was my father's favorite month, and I can see it his way:  the month is capable of miraculous, halcyon, warmly-gusty days that stir the blood and make the person venturing outside feel that he, too, might be capable of photosynthesis. Plus, the daffodils do come up.  On days like today, however, I am with Alice  Thomas Ellis and the curate and the egg, though I don't have the faintest idea what drugget might be. (Ah. "a rug from India of coarse hair, either cotton or jute." How good it is to improve the mind.)

In England Aelred, who bought me my other volumes of Home Life, never could track down the third. Jody seems to have pulled it right up on Amazon, a lovely hardbound copy which I will try not to drop in the bathtub. And it's not the only one in circulation, obviously, though now that I've seen the "best price," I really do think I ought to get down to writing something printable.


(yes, yes. It's a sponsored link. Ka-ching, and all that sort of thing.)

So . . . what are you reading on this singularly gloomy -- or if you're in Australia, like Leonie and Erin, this probably singularly sunny summery -- day?

More literary links of one kind or another:

Why we still read Dickens
Thinking in metaphors
Revision and the editorial hand:  Nabokov and Carver
Rilke:  Every angel is terrifying, even with feet of clay
On the putative death of the literary journal, here and here 
Zinsser on how to learn to write
 Sylvia Townsend Warner
and more.

Plus, Maclin considers what to read for Lent.