If You Ask Your Brother For Bread, or a Fish, or Something Like That . . .

"So," said Amicus at the dinner table tonight, "I was asleep, and I dreamed that I asked Helier for a glass of water. He kept bringing me glasses with no water in them, and I was getting angrier and angrier, until finally I woke up."

Laughter.

"Then I was still mad, so I woke him up. And I told him --"

More laughter.

You told him you were mad at him? In a dream?

"No, I told him -- "

More laughter.

You told him you were mad at him in a dream.

"No!" Laughter. "I told him --" More laughter. Finally:  "I was so mad at him I told him it was Christmas."



(I should add that according to him, the parties involved in this dream incident were about nine and four at the time. I only just heard about it tonight, though)

Holy Holy Holy Moly

Okay, so my First Communion class were the ones who, way back in the fall, so to speak, told me that our first parents -- those two naked people in the bushes, in our  textbook's  picture of the  Creation --  were named Odd and Even, right?  It took us weeks to get that straight.

 And whatever they think they know about the Holy Trinity, I just hope it's . . . I hope it's not . . . let's all hope that if you asked them right now, they'd say . . . that is, they wouldn't say . . . it wouldn't be . . .




Scroll down . . . .











Keeeeeeep scrolling . . .

Anakin, Dumbledore, and Mr. Spooky. 

Please. 

(Okay, so this is a bit of an Icons and Curiosities retread. 'Tis the season.)

Hymn List for Trinity Sunday at Saint Dymphna's

Everybody sing!

Holy Holy Holy
Holy God, We Praise Thy Name
How Wonderful, the Three-in-One (tune:  Praetorius' "Puer Nobis")
All Hail, Adored Trinity (the tune in our hymnal is "Old Hundredth," but I like this one better)

Tonight at the Vigil Mass, I'm cantoring by myself;  for a second piece at Communion I think I'll just chant the "Ave Verum Corpus."



Tomorrow it'll be two, maybe three of us, singing a capella because our organist is off at her fifty-fifth high-school reunion, and the substitute has a regular Sunday-morning gig at a Lutheran church. So it goes in a small-town parish. Anyway, our choice for a second Communion hym is "Anima Christi" in as many parts as we have people to sing them.  (Hear more of Psallamus here). H/T

And now  I've got to bestir myself  to clean up the yard and house, because tomorrow an  unspecified number of people are coming over for a potluck and hymn-sing, which will also involve some bluegrass and, if we drink enough mint juleps, more Latin translations of Bob Dylan.

Lest anyone entertain the mistaken notion that we're musical purists around here or anything . . . we just like sangin',  honey. We just like sangin'.

The Center Cannot Hold If There Isn't One

From my friend David Mills, a meditation on the "spiritual-not-religious" trope:

The word “spiritual” has no useful meaning if it does not refer to a relation to a real spirit, something from a world not our own, something supernatural, something that or someone who tells us things we do not know, judges us for our failures, and gives us ideals to strive for and maybe help in reaching them. It’s not a useful word if it means a general inclination or shape of mind or emotional pattern or set of attitudes or collection of values. There is no reason to call any of these spiritual.

Unless, of course, you like that little sense of importance and that comforting sense of social approval that our society still gives to “spiritual things,” though not to religious things. It’s a warm and fuzzy word. It’s a cute cuddly bunny word. It’s not like “religion.” That’s a cold and forbidding word. It’s a screeching preacher with bad breath word.

A better definition is not, however, wanted. The moment you acknowledge a real spirit to whom your spirituality is oriented and by whom it is guided, however distant and unengaged that spirit may be, you have a religion. You are bound by something. You have marching orders. You have to ask what the spirit wants and what he requires and what he says.

Read the rest. 

Related:  God Is Not Sophisticated Enough.

I really never thought that I'd have a favorite Anne Lamott quote again, but then there's this:

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Somehow I suspect that she thinks she's not talking to people who hate George Bush, for example. But that doesn't mean that what she says isn't true.

Meanwhile, Pentimento, singer, writer, scholar, and mother, bears sober witness to lives lived and unlived:

We were the closest of friends: a group of young aspiring artists living in the East Village, moving from one provisional household to the next, drinking Hungarian red wine because nothing else was cheaper, staying up late into the night, sprawled across one another's sofas (which were generally old, upholstered with shabby velveteen, and draped with Indian-print throws to keep the stuffing from spilling out onto the floor), conversing animatedly about art and beauty and the other deepest desires of our hearts.  We were young women in our teens and early twenties.  We were generally both broke pocket-wise and broken heart-wise, except for the one or two of us who appeared to have found our soul-mates, deep wells into whom we could sink all of our intense need for contact, for engagement, for communion; not one of those unions now survives.  We were painters, photographers, writers, musicians, and performance artists.  We all worked together in the same cafés and bars and lived within a few blocks of each other, ranging from Avenue B to Avenue D and from East 14th Street down to Rivington.

More . . .

Here, now, everything's suddenly gone green, and the air is full of thunder. The little kids have run to hide in the closet  -- upstairs, because that's where all the toys are -- and I am thinking that I should step away from the computer before some lightning-infused electro-rays  reach out of the screen and zap me. Besides, it's hard to type with a shivering 60-pound dog in your lap.

Ukraine's Got Talent

Via our friend Larry, an astonishing performance by Kseniya Simonova, who won the 2009 edition of Ukraine's Got Talent with -- of all things -- a sand painting depicting the effects on ordinary people of the German invasion of the Ukraine during World War II.

You've simply got to see this. The glimpses of people in the audience weeping as they watch are almost as moving as the sand images themselves.

Garden Notes

I have found what I believe is a lot of wild grapevine in a back corner of my yard; that is, I didn't just now find it. I knew it was there. But it only just hit me the other day that it might be grapevine, and not merely your standard-issue Obnoxious Southern Invasive Plant-Garroting Nightmare (Non-Kudzu Version).

Here's the biggest lot of it, growing on a thick, woody stem up the back of our garage. Technically it's not our grapevine, as it's in the side yard of the house behind us, where it tangles with an already-laden fig tree. But as that house is vacant, and a good deal of the vine spills over the fence onto our property, not to mention the fact that its babies are spiralling up all along the back wall, I'm going to go ahead and claim it.

Now, for the moment, I am going ahead and assuming that this really is wild grape. I've been researching around off and on all day, in and among the day's other tasks, and I'm fairly convinced that I'm right. You can't see them in any of the photos I took, but this vine, imposing itself into the garage-attic doorway above, is full of tiny clusters of what look right now like little green beads, whose development I will be observing with great interest. Meanwhile, I've just about decided that it really would be all right to make dolmathes with the leaves (more about using, preserving, and storing grape leaves here).

Interesting wild-grape discussion here and here. The backyard forager is warned, by the way, against mistaking poisonous moonseed for wild grape.  I'll watch the development of those fruits with interest, though the leaves of my vine really don't look like those of the moonseed.

Meanwhile, I've planted one raspberry bush and am hoping to acquire more. This one is two or three years old already and is bearing fruit;  what I've thought of doing is acquiring two immature specimens, which come cheaper than the already-fruit-bearing ones, to fill out the bed I've made for them.

 

Crispina, who sampled both the ripe-enough-to-eat berries the bush has borne thus far, reports that they are "deluciously sweet." I guess the rest of us will have to wait and see for ourselves.

Here's Helier's garden, with corn, pumpkins, sunflowers, and morning-glory vines (trellised on the sunflowers):

And here's some sorrel, which you can tell from the weeds because the sorrel is growing in a straight line, more or less:

Finally, my Painted Lady runner beans are going like sixty, an expression I first heard in a rather digressive Bob and Ray sketch years ago. I had planted the beans with corn in the garden along the driveway, thinking that the beans would be trellised on the corn -- you can do this with pole beans, so, you know, why not . . . What I didn't count on was the runner beans' exploding out of the earth full-formed like Athena, with enormous triangular leaves that shaded the emergent corn. At this writing, the corn is holding its own, but it all looks a little like a seventh-grade dance out there. Still, the beans are, as my dad would have remarked, right pretty:

For some comic relief from all the virtual garden work: 

Marriage as Discipleship UPDATED

From Betty Duffy, a must-read for the engaged, the newlywed, and the people like me who after twenty years are tempted to think they know it all:

Burns, I'm learning, are tricky, as if they are not treated, the skin will continue to burn for several days, inflicting more and deeper damage to the lower layers of skin. The greatest risk for a burn victim is infection, so the wounds have to be, not just patted clean, but scrubbed, to remove yesterday's salve and bits of dead skin. New ointment is then applied, then gauze and bandages.

Scrubbing a loved one's open wounds is not something one does casually. Reading about the apostle Thomas touching the wounds of Christ after Easter, I made a note to myself, this is significant in some way I don't yet know. It was this morning, my bare hands weeding through my husband's open tissue, I realized the fear and humility that must have instantly replaced the apostle's pride and doubt when he touched the wounds of Christ. It was indeed the body of the Lord, as Thomas's hands penetrated each layer of skin; a body, inside and out, died and risen.

More . . .

PLUS:  Fun With Happiness Studies;  or, The Less You Need Him, the Less You Like Him.

Statistically speaking, of course.

H/T

More Thoughts on Prayer

Over the weekend we went to visit some friends in the country. By "in the country," I mean that although they live on the verges of Panacea Falls, they have six hilly acres with a swimming pool, a basketball court, a barn, a bonfire pit, and a frog pond, and their next-door neighbors keep horses in the yard. Going to their house is like going on vacation, so we visit them as frequently as we can without being rude ("Hi! Through with breakfast yet? Good. We'll just be putting our bathing suits on . . . ").

The children spent hours in the pool, hours poking the bonfire, hours playing Capture the Flag in the pitch-black dark outside the oblongs of light the windows cast across the grass. The adults spent hours watching them do all these things -- well, we couldn't see what went on during most of Capture the Flag, but we figured that as long as we didn't hear screaming, everything was all right. Once children have passed the age of being absolutely certain to drown if they fall into the pool, which coincidentally, and unfortunately, happens to be the age of wanting to hurl themselves with reckless abandon (is there ever such a thing as cautious abandon?) into the pool, or the fire, too, for that matter, you can sit resting your eyes on the general space they occupy, drink your drink, and carry on relatively uninterrupted conversations, which my children are still young enough for me not to take for granted.

Somehow or other, we fell to discussing prayer. The father of the family we were visiting remarked that one thing he envied their Protestant friends was the ease with which the children of those friends spoke, extemporaneously, to God. Having a hard time sharing? Ask God to help you get over it. Dear God, please help me to share with my sister. Amen. 

 "Yeah," his wife said, "we tell our kids to say a Hail Mary, but somehow it's not quite the same thing."

Now, having spent a good deal of my life as a Protestant, I must confess that it has never occurred to me  not to speak extemporaneously to God, at least in private.  I am not a fan of extemporaneous public prayer -- "Ah,  Father God, we, ah, just come together to, ah, just, ask you to just, ah, just hold this broken lawn mower, Lord, just in, ah, the palm of Your hand, Lord" -- any more than, for instance, I actively prefer improvisational theater to Shakespeare. A little of the former goes a long, long, long way, in my view;  I think it's probably meant more for the amusement of the actors than the audience.

Extemporaneous prayer, likewise, is private conversation. It's the saint remarking to God that as badly as He treats His friends, it's no wonder He has so few of them. That's the kind of thing you just don't say corporately. On the other hand, the psalmist certainly suggests as much at certain junctures, and we pray those moments, too, in the course of the Daily Office, non-extemporaneouswise, so to speak.

But it occurs to me here that at one time the psalmody which we pray as a Church was -- or had as its germ -- a private, extemporaneous exhange with God. Somebody in a moment of perceived abandonment said something which became My God, my God, why have you foresaken me? On the Cross, Jesus takes up these words, and they are at once both the words of received tradition and His own. Of course, His is a case of God quoting Himself, to Himself, which is in another league from any feeble attempt of ours to address the Almighty.

It is also the case of a native speaker crying out in His own tongue. For us, as Father likes to say, prayer is a foreign language, which we best learn by immersion in the liturgy of the Church, its most proficient speaker. If we immerse ourselves in the effort of praying the Mass, if we pray the Daily Office, if we practice even something so repetitive and "rote" as the Rosary, then we're at least putting our faces in the pool and kicking our feet, while the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, translating, with sighs deeper than words. In one sense, the actual words we say probably matter less than what we mean by them;  the advantage of praying words received from tradition is that they help us to understand better what we do mean.

Time to attend to the morning's demands, but I'd like to talk about this more later, if I don't forget all about it.

Eastern Chant for Pentecost

via Stuart Koehl

Meanwhile, the Holy Father asks, “[W]ho or what is the Holy Spirit? How can we recognize him? How do we go to him and how does he come to us? What does he do?"

And answers:

And there we see something totally unexpected: in God, an "I" and a "You" exist. The mysterious God is not infinite loneliness, he is an event of love. If by gazing at creation we think we can glimpse the Creator Spirit, God himself, rather like creative mathematics, like a force that shapes the laws of the world and their order, but then, even, also like beauty - now we come to realize: the Creator Spirit has a heart. He is Love.

H/T

Veni, Creator Spiritus (cries the Latin West)!

What Are Your Bookends?

Over at First Thoughts, Joe Carter asks:  “If you had a shelf of books to help explain yourself, which two books would form the outer boundaries—the bookends—of you?”

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas? Or, like Joe, would you say Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism and Lonesome Dove? Middlemarch and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom?



Joe's question has sparked some lively combox conversation. Probably my favorite response comes from my friend David Mills, who found his own bookends in the books he has most loved reading to his children:  Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the Sherlock Holmes stories of SirArthur Conan Doyle. For those of us who have children and read to them -- if you're here, and you have children, and you don't read to them, please get up from the computer now and go to the library and don't come back until you've finished some good chapter book together (and if you want suggestions, I can hand 'em out like free cheescake samples at the Bi-Lo) -- this is an excellent measure of our own personalities, though hopefully we don't spend that much time in real life thinking about how our bedtime reading selections are ultimately an expression of us.

That idea, though -- what I choose to read to my children, what I love to read to my children, what I think my children can't leave my house without having heard -- does help me to narrow my search. Otherwise, I've got a set of bookends for every shelf in my mental furnished apartment:  Kristin Lavransdatter and Augustine's Confessions;  The Song of the Lark and The Rule of Saint Benedict;  Four Quartets and The Other Side of the Fire;  Pride and Prejudice and The Backyard Homestead.

Those are all books I've read to myself, over and over and over;  those and more. But when I think of what I've read to my children, two books come to mind as musts. The first is probably utterly predictable:  The Lord of the Rings. If you don't hate it, and some people do, you think it's the work of twentieth-century literature, the story of everything, the titanic accomplishment of an otherwise-obscure linguist who intuited that story, embedded in the language of its origins, is the life of culture, and that when the stories die, the culture too languishes on its deathbed. Of course it's also a rousing great tale, into which the Christian story, above all, is woven with an intricacy which puts mere allegory to shame. It's the story you read because you, too, care about story, and poetry, and song, and heroism, and the saving of a world which in its imperfection is still beautiful and worth the sacrifice of salvation -- but mostly because it strikes at the heart of why you are sitting at your child's bedside reading aloud in the first place. You want that child to care, too, and in caring, to be more fully alive in body and in soul.

Okay, so there's that. The second book which I've read aloud to my children, and which we've all loved as we love our nearest and dearest relatives is The Middle Moffat, by Eleanor Estes. Jane, the titular Middle Moffat, is a heroine for the ages:  not that she does anything especially heroic in the course of the story, but because she is alive, awake, and -- as Polynesia the Parrot in Doctor Dolittle puts it -- a noticing sort of person, a person for whom the small eccentricities of ordinary people in the confines of a small early-20th-century town are a source of endless fascination, amusement, and questioning, and whose imaginative life, larger though it is, never distances her from the life she is actually living. She's a child who could grow up to be a writer, but also to be simply a kind, goodhearted person.

So, what about you? Don't worry, I'm not putting the linky widget up again. Just asking:  if you had to pick "bookends," what would they be?

PS:  On the other hand, if I were going to choose a book to go to confession for me, it might well be Miguel de Unamuno's Abel Sanchez . . .

Last Chance Friday Poetry: Two Owls

I like owls possibly better than I like any other bird, even the mystical thrush.


Haunting


The world is dark and enormous
beyond the porch, yet a faint flicker

of light finds the lake through sweet gum,
oak -- lightning behind clouds

depriving the valley of its loneliness
only a moment. Then I

step down and don't
go forward, for I have heard

what must be the great horned owl,
a haunting that flew in just before dusk

when I glanced out the window
and thought hawk. How many times have I caught that

coming to me, a comfort, from the otherwise
frightening darkness? Once, I watched the wide

ashen wings of an owl hovering above me,
gradually floating away and down

a blaze of sky. I wondered why owls were
always alone when I saw them, unlike hawks

drifting farther and farther apart, yet often together.
After a time that owl came slowly back

to cast his outstretched shadow across the grass
and vanish. Later, I listened to the eerie articulation

and found in that nocturnal cry the credible
expression of love and sorrow, at once.

Tonight the owl is uttering
something else, not the long commiserating cry

of other nights, when I walked with lover or friend
by Echo Lake, or sat by my father,

his cramped hands clutching each other, his body curled.
I am witness now to another sound, a warning,

like the howl of a dog, or loon,
and certainly not human, so subsequently wait

again for the cry. It does not come.
It shakes me. For what else could be clearer

in telling me to wait -- or not to go at all --
than this cry of an owl I can't identify in the dark?

I can nearly hear him slant from the apple
to the oak, drawing farther away into the wilderness,

his deed done, leaving it up to me to stay or go.
I know. I am unable to make

communication, therefore remain at the foot of the porch
and feel the reality of this, that a man

might die desperate on his bed
with an audience of strangers, small and immeasurable as the corpse

of a child. Are you there? Are there two of you?
Are you looking at me now?

Dennis Sampson
The Double Genesis
Story Line Press, 1985


Some Shadows

On the snow at night,
I saw once the shadow
of a huge sound,
which I had heard begin
as I passed under an old cherry tree,
then immaculate for winter.
There was the preparation,
which I can only say I heard,
though sound came next.
There was the sound, all at once --
a living thing, lifting.
I felt a giant presence
and looked down.
When I looked up, the shadow
I had seen leaving
took all the sky.
Too big for me,
I thought, but when I thought again
I could see again the owl
I had seen on the lawn of the church
the morning the Methodists
met to make the softball team.
Over its head it wore
a number 3 paper bag.
Someone thought it could see better
in the dark. It
spoke a little, took a step
this way and that,
before someone else put it under an arm
and took it toward dusk.
I walked on the lawn
with the good Boy Scouts, thinking,
that dumb owl. Come out in the open
like that. I can see him today,
slowed by sunlight,
stuck to his shadow.
Inside the paper bag,
his pinned wing
made a sound like applause.

Marvin Bell
New and Selected Poems
Atheneum, 1987

Winter's Come and Gone: Two Renderings

 Dailey and Vincent:



And Gillian Welch:

 

Harmony and the Kitchen Sink

H/T

The Philosopher and the Divine

 "One feels a fool," Alice Thomas Ellis wrote once, "asking Professor Sir Alfred Ayer if he wouldn't like an icky bitty more soup in his ickle bowl." She was speaking of days spent in the country with no company but small children, and what that did to one's powers of rational speech, even upon one's return to London.

I thought of Ellis's tossed-off sliver of an anecdote when, in the course of my morning reading, I stumbled on the name Sir A.J. Ayer.  In addition to being Alice Thomas Ellis's luncheon guest,  Ayer was of course the eminent British philosopher of the mid-20th century. Moreover he was, as his son-in-law Peter Foges writes, an atheist.

Not just any old atheist—the atheist as far as millions of Britons were concerned. In addition to establishing his reputation as one of the great analytic and rationalist philosophers of the century with such works as Language, Truth and Logic and the later Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer had spent most of his adult life putting the case very publicly on radio and television, as well as in print, for the “non-existence” of God—indeed arguing that the very idea of “God” was devoid of meaning, a position known in theology as igtheism. He had gone twelve rounds with the best and the brightest of the bishops and theologians in the land—and in the public mind he was thought, in the main, to have triumphed.

What fascinates Foges, however, is an incident which occurred towards the end of Ayer's life. In hospital recovering from pneumonia, Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon slipped to him clandestinely by a visiting friend while the nurses looked the other way. He spent the next four minutes clinically dead.  And like many people who loiter on the shores of death, he found something there which was not exactly the nothing he had posited.

“I was confronted by a red light…Aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe. Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space...”
Somehow Ayer was aware, however, “that space, like a badly fitted jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint…with the consequence that the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should.”

. . .

“I thought,” he went on, “that I could cure space by operating upon time…The ministers who had been given charge of time were in my neighborhood and I proceeded to hail them…” They however seemed quite uninterested in the philosopher’s offer, despite his twirling his grandfather’s fob watch (which he always carried) around furiously to attract their attention. Ayer’s “experience” came to end, as he reported, with him in “despair.”

Ayer went on to describe his experiences in an article, at the conclusion of which he asserted,  “[M]y recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no God.” He later amended this conclusion to read,

“What I should have written at the end (instead of the words 'slightly weakened'),” he wrote, “was that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief.

Writes Foges:

 In these two pieces—the second in particular—Ayer was clearly at pains to preserve his reputation, of which he was almost childishly proud. In the public imagination he was the champion slayer of theological nonsense, the pioneer of logical positivism, and the winner—in his own eyes at any rate—of his famous 1949 BBC radio debate about the existence or otherwise of god with Father Frederick Copleston, Britain’s most formidable modern Catholic philosopher.

Despite the vision of the river and the "rude, dismissive Masters of the Universe," Foges writes, Ayer's death experience seemed -- publicly, at any rate -- to confirm him as a "born-again atheist."

The private story, however, is more complicated . . .

You'll want to read the rest.

H/T

P.S. I have no idea why all the copied-and-pasted quotations, block and otherwise, are in red. They don't link to anything. My computer seems to be losing whatever was left of its mind. Or else it's just mistaken the words of Peter Foges, Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, and anyone else who isn't me for those of Jesus.

Last Chance! A Message from Brother Michael Mary of the Wyoming Carmelites, a.k.a. the Mystic Coffee-Roasting Monks

Dear Sally (he writes -- we don't actually know each other, but that business-affiliate bond puts us in immediate first-name proximity, via email): 

I pray that this Easter 2010 has been one of many blessings for you and your family.

We only have a short time left in the Easter season! If you haven't already tried it, now is your last chance to stock up on Pascha Java . . . Don't normally drink flavored coffees? I invite you to try Pascha Java - it is arguably our best flavor, with hints of white chocolate, festive spices and bourbon, which you are sure to enjoy. 

Pascha Java is only available for the next week, and will not be available as a selection for the coffee club, so I would suggest you take advantage of the opportunity and order some now!

You can order via their website or over the phone, but why not do it via one simple click on the banner below:  



Order your favorite coffee, read and support your favorite blog, all in one swell foop.

What with youth mission trips and other summer activities almost upon us, you might consider the following as well:



Mmmmm . . . wake up and smell the coffee . . .

Soul of Christ: Praying for the Holy Spirit

At Mass on Monday morning, Father charged us with using this week between the Ascension and Pentecost to pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Of course, in one sense this is a bit of a redundancy;  the approaching feast is a commemoration of an historical event, not a re-enactment. No flames on people's heads -- much to Helier and Crispina's disappointment. That would be seriously worth showing up for.

I think, however, though I may make free with Father's meaning, that what this week is for is to make us aware -- to make us discipline ourselves to be aware -- of a desire in our own souls to have the soul of Christ indwell us. For the apostles, it was a space of waiting and of being without the animation of Jesus' immediate presence. For us it's more like the gift of a spiritual exercise in longing for what we already longed for;  it's an exercise in naming what we long for, instead of roaming around the kitchen eating up whatever's there because we think we might be hungry, or surfing the web because surely there's someone out there who will talk to us in our loneliness.

At Communion we often sing a simple little four-part hymn setting of the Anima Christi , that sublime and humble prayer. Here it is rendered by the French Baroque composer Lully:

 

Anima Christi, sanctifica me.

Corpus Christi, salva me.

Sanguis Christi, inebria me.

Aqua lateris Christi, lava me.

Passio Christi, conforta me.

O bone Jesu, exaudi me.

Intra tua vulnera absconde me.

Ne permittas me separari a te.

Ab hoste maligno defende me.

In hora mortis meae voca me.

Et iube me venire ad te,

Ut cum Sanctis tuis laudem te.

In saecula saeculorum.

Amen

Annoying Motherism #4762

Room-Cleaning Child:  I can't put these clothes away! They're dirty!

Annoying Mother:  You should have thought of that before you stored them on the floor.

Yeah, You Can Call Me "Your Hipsterness."

"Your Christian Hipsterness," that is. Or technically maybe I'd be a "Your Hipstressness."

Anyway, I took this quiz, and here's what it had to say about me: 

High CHQ. [That's "Christian Hipster Quotient, for all you unhipsters out there] You are a pretty progressive, stylish, hipster-leaning Christian, even while you could easily feel at home in a decidedly un-hip non-denominational church. You are conservative on some issues and liberal on others, and sometimes you grow weary of trendy "alt-Christianity." But make no mistake: You are a Christian hipster to at least some degree.

Uh, yes.  "To at least some degree" about says it:  to at least the degree at which I turn out to be a middle-aged Catholic, and my favorite Christian recording artist is revealed to be Palestrina.

On the other hand, my shirt did come from the thrift store. And I said I'd sign up for a course on "Literary Calvinism" because the title included the word "literary," and all the alternatives made me want to throw up.

I'm not hip enough to want to review the book, however, so don't let's anybody out there get any ideas.

Thanks, MM, for five minutes of my time out the window.

Summer Homeschooling

Though it's only mid-May, we've down-shifted already into our summer semester. Now, annually for the past seven years, I've set up our semester structure in the online recordkeeping program  to include a summer session, but until recently what I've mostly meant by that was that closing the school books didn't mean we stopped learning. We still read, we still observed nature, we still went to historical places, and all that. What we were taking in from the world still counted as knowledge, so I counted it in my recordkeeping.

This year, however, I've decided that we need to school through the summer. There will be plenty of weeks off:  Amicus has Scout camp and various other trips planned, Epiphany's going to UDallas  and then college-looking, while the short folks will be busy with Cub Scout day camp, a week of Totus Tuus at church, and  swimming lessons. Still, we'll have plenty of weeks to fill with -- something. And with one person ascending to her senior year in high school, another entering seventh grade, and two more needing to solidify basic skills, I thought we could do worse than to use our time for some intensive mini-courses to prepare us for next year.

Our school days start rather later than earlier anyway -- I've never been able to make myself put people to bed before 9:30, especially when the sun's still up. Dad comes home late, more often than not, and we want to eat dinner as a family, so our daily needle's fixed toward the evening, and that's the way it is. In the mornings, I go to Mass, often enough with one or both of the older children;  by the time we get home, other people are starting to emerge;  everyone has a leisurely breakfast and some playtime and -- ideally but not always actually -- makes his or her bed and straightens his or her room. When everyone's worked off a little physical energy, then we're ready to settle down for prayers and some seatwork.

In the summer this makes more sense than ever:  it's never exactly cool around here in the summer, but mornings are generally bearable. If people are going to play outside, morning and evening are the times to do it. That leaves the middle of the day, the great white-hot meridian, when everyone lolls hopelessly around the house and moans that they've got nothing to doooooooooooo.

Ha ha. Have I got things for us to do. Here's what:  

1. Epiphany:  1 hour of math, 1 lesson each in Jensen's Grammar and Jensen's Format Writing, some biology review, and summer reading. We're still finishing one year of math, and plan to begin next year's course by early June, because as bitter experience has taught us, it just takes that long. Summer also seemed a good time to squeeze in a concentrated daily refresher course in grammar and composition. The biology refresher seemed a good idea;  I think she could do well on the SAT subject test in biology, and that it would serve her well to take it,  so she's working her way through the study questions in Barron's Biology the Easy Way and watching The Standard Deviants, who are a hoot.

2. Amicus:  1 hour of pre-algebra, which he began in March and which I want to give him plenty of time to finish thoroughly so that he can take Algebra I in eighth grade;  1 hour of summer reading;  and daily handwriting practice. It's been a couple of years since we actively worked on penmanship, and what with the amount of writing which his next-year's lessons will require, not to mention a never-ending line for the computer, I thought it would behoove us to revisit this basic skill.

3. Helier:  20 minutes of math;  10 minutes' assigned reading (still haven't finished and/or posted his summer-reading list;  at the moment he's reading Miss Pickerel Goes to Mars);  a daily handwriting lesson. My goal for him is to have him  writing both clearly and fluently by the end of the summer. Writing First-Communion thank-you notes was an exercise in . . . well, your hellish metaphor here. The math I don't want him to forget, but the writing is an area in which we need to make actual progress.

4. Crispina:  10 minutes' reading practice;  10 minutes' math;  one handwriting lesson daily. She is finishing the first level in the Little Angel Readers;  once that's done, we'll plunge into Level 2 of the CHC Little Stories for Little Folks series and do the accompanying handwriting/phonics lessons. It won't hurt us to be ahead of the lesson plans in those areas come fall -- that will help us to keep our school time relatively short, and to spend more of it on the history-timeline project I've been working up for the two youngers to do together. The better a foundation we lay this summer, the more we'll be able to do, with less frustration, on a project which will integrate all these basic skills.

So there you have it. Here are some more summer-homeschooling-themed links and thoughts: 

Try summer journaling, for example.


April at Homeschool Musings posts a "What-Can-I-Do" list.


How about this great miscellany of summer-friendly ideas at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers?

At Roof With A View, water play for the tiny (and maybe the not-so-tiny) guys. Love the ice-painting!

I provided a link above to the Arete program at the University of Dallas;  here are more summer programs for high-schoolers at Catholic colleges and universities.

An apologia for year-round homeschooling.

OK, who can resist a site called "French Culinary Homeschooling?" And this summer drink looks like a million bucks, too.

On taking learning outside.

DIY summer camp

And more? If you've got summer ideas or links to summer programs and resources, why not pop them in the widget below? If you have a blog, post your link there and then link to this post, so that we can share the goodies around.

Veni Sancte Spiritus, &c.

Here we find ourselves in the downtime, the week -- or ten days, if you're a purist like us and observed the Feast of the Ascension last Thursday, bang at forty days post-Easter -- that hangs on the line between the Lord's departing into heaven, and the descent of the Holy Spirit to become, as Father put it this morning, the soul vivifying the Body which is the Church. The Anchoress has been posting a Pentecost novena, which you're not too late to join;  neither am I, for that matter. If you know me at all, then you know already that I'm the Bertie Wooster of prayer, and that my mentioning a novena should not induce contractions of guilt in the souls of my friends. Or my enemies, either. So relax.

Meanwhile, what Pentecost means in the life of the Faith Formation Program at Saint Dymphna's is a chaos, a speaking-in-tongues, a drunkenish disorder of a particular kind. This is the day, long-anticipated -- I remembered two weeks ago, right after we got done with First Communion -- when all the Faith Formation classes, from the Pre-Ks to the Confirmandi, present some kind of . . . presentation . . . on the patron saints which we were all assigned in September. Presumably the second grade has been asking all year for the intercession of Saint Benedict. See "Bertie Wooster," above, and you'll understand why, when I asked the class two weeks ago to remind me who our saint was, they all said, "Uhhh. That dude."

Now, however, they can tell you a lot about Saint Benedict, thanks to the skit which we practiced and practiced and practiced for a whole hour yesterday.

They can tell you that he was a shrimpy dude in a Cub Scout uniform which he apparently slept in at the Camp-In (with tents!) in the church social hall on Saturday night.

They can tell you that he liked to pray a lot, and that because of this a cave, made by two tall girls doing London Bridge with their hands, appeared miraculously over his head.

They can tell you that a raven in a miniature three-piece investment-banker's suit fed him and then turned into one of two monks who came to join him, all the others having concluded that, First Communion being over and done with, they don't have to come to class any more.

They can tell you that some of his monks --  how you can have "some" monks, when you have only two to start with, is one of the great mysteries of our faith -- found him too strict and tried to poison him, which is why he is often pictured holding a styrofoam coffee cup with a pencil sticking out of it.

They can tell you that he had a twin sister, Scholastica, also a saint and the leader of many nuns:  many, many more nuns than Saint Benedict had monks. Nuns know you have to keep coming to class. They can tell you that at one of Benedict and Scholastica's yearly visits, she wanted him to stay longer, but he said, Ta-ta! and pantomimed sort of goose-stepping away. But then a storm blew up and he stayed, which was good because then she died -- she just lay right down on the floor in front of everybody with her eyes closed and her hands folded in prayer, and all the nuns knelt down very piously and folded their hands, too.

And then Saint Benedict gagged and grabbed his throat and flung his own legs out from under him and collapsed in a heap on the floor -- he insisted on dying this way, in fact, even though he knew perfectly well that the monks hadn't been near the poison closet in decades -- and the monks meant to kneel down just as piously as the nuns, really they did, but it's hard to look pious when you're writhing on the carpet, because the holy demise of your Superior is, like, the funniest thing you've seen since Zack and Cody went off the Disney Channel.

Finally,  we all know how to ask Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica to pray for us, because we practiced that about twenty times, too, in unison, con brio, and I sure hope they heard us.

Altar Servers, the Incense of Mystery, and the Sodality of Saint Tarcisius

Really I was drawn to the first image illustrating this item about an altar-servers' Masterclass at Blackfriars, Oxford. I mean, take away the high altar, the soaring ceiling, the beautiful window whose white light pours through the incense, and those could be our boys at Saint Dymphna's (that, or one could almost imagine oneself in the small summer breakfast parlor at Rosings).

Except that we have an altar rail . . .

Sunday Night Sing-In: Mahalia Jackson

Yeah, like we can sing along with that.

See a later, rawer rendering of the same hymn here.

St. Ephrem's Guide to Serious Cosmic Patience

 Stumbled across this in my reading tonight: 

Though the Lord has established the signs of his coming, the time of their fulfillment has not been plainly revealed. These signs have come and gone with a multiplicity of change;  more than that, they are still present. His final coming is like his first. As holy men and prophets waited for him, thinking that he would reveal himself in their own day, so today each of the faithful longs to welcome him in his own day, because Christ has not made plain the day of his coming.

He has not made it plain for this reason especially, that no one may think that he whose power and dominion rule all numbers and times is ruled by fate and time . . .

From a Commentary on the Diatessaron by Saint Ephrem ,  hermit,  poet, and  Doctor of the Church  since, um, 1920, a mere 1547 years after his death. When a guy like this says, Keep watch, he means it for the long haul.

Friday Poetry, Plus Nuns

My friend Rachel reports that her fourth daughter, currently finishing her first year at the Air Force Academy, will soon be leaving the Academy to become a postulant with the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia in Nashville. Though I think the Nashville Dominicans are very much "in the swing of the sea," this poem nevertheless came to mind:

Heaven-Haven
A nun takes the veil


I have desired to go
    Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
     And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
     Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
     And out of the swing of the sea.

                                     Gerard Manley Hopkins

Having recently, and wrenchingly, given one daughter over to God's keeping, Rachel and her husband now find another giving herself to God in this beautiful way, which is cause for rejoicing.

If you're not familiar with the Nashville Dominicans, check them out here. 

I was relieved, incidentally, to see that they were spared in the recent Nashville flooding.

Finally, I might have posted this before, but it's worth seeing again:

The Standardized Test and the Non-Standard Test-Taker

So yesterday we finished  up our  annual  round of state-mandated  standardized  competency  testing. As I've said before, we use the California Achievement Test, which has the perhaps-dubious benefit of being both state-approved and available for administration by parents. After the last phase of tests, I was glancing over a certain person's work for stray marks which might gum up the scoring machine, when my eye happened to fall on a set of answers in the reading-comprehension section. I won't give the person's name away;  it was a boy, and he's not taller than I am, that's all I'll say. Well, I'll add this:  it was a boy who knows perfectly well how to read. He reads morning, noon, and night. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure he understands what he's reading, because even when I haven't asked him to narrate back to me something that he's read for school, he likes to talk about books, especially when they're funny, and he consistently gives every appearance of having gotten all the jokes. His answers to this set of reading-comprehension questions, however, were from outer space. Out of five or six questions, maybe one response was right. It was as if he'd glanced at the passage, shut his eyes, and started answering questions by feel. The passage, you should know, was about the children's illustrator Kate Greenaway, who painted all those little sunbonnet girls dancing hand-in-hand among the flowers on Planet Quaint; according to the passage, little children love her pictures so much that they want to dress in old-fashioned clothes, so as to feel that they, too, are in the pictures. Ah, I thought. I guess we won't be blowing "reading comprehension" out of the water this year. This may be one of those instances that make homeschooling apologists (like, um, me, for instance) break out in hives, verily one of those times when homeschooled child and oft-cited test-performance statistics do not kiss. But what do these wrong answers tell me? If I hadn't been the one administering the test, if I'd just gotten the scores back in the mail, I might have freaked out. I might have imagined that the kid who follows me from room to room reading aloud and falling down laughing at the funny parts had just been putting me on all this time. As it is, the conclusion that I draw is that this particular boy really could not give a rat's patoot for Kate Greenaway and little sunbonnet girls. He probably read the first two sentences, thought, "Nah," and proceeded to blunder his way through the questions just to get to whatever came next. As far as I recall, he managed to answer other sets of reading-comprehension questions just fine; the lesson to be drawn, I think, is that we need to work on persevering at things which do not necessarily light our fires. Of course, when you're administering these tests, the temptation to manipulate your child's performance is not un-great. You know that child, after all, and you know -- so the script runs in your mind -- what he would have answered, had he been in his right mind. Of course you can't do that; what is written is written, and all you can do is seal it up in the envelope and send it off for scoring. And you figure, well, maybe you'll learn something useful from it all. At least, that's how I feel about the whole testing thing. I know that some people feel that any standardized-testing requirement is an imposition on their freedom as homeschoolers, and I can see their point. For many homeschoolers, the whole point of homeschooling is -- for whatever reason, and there's no shortage of good ones -- not to be bound by conventional scope-and-sequence expectations or public-school-type curriculum standards. It is true that many children, maybe most children, maybe all children, don't come in standard-sized intellectual packages, and that if your child reads and does math like a third-grader, but his handwriting is a kindergartener's and his attention span is a gnat's, well, that's what second grade should look like for that child, regardless of what a competency exam has to say about him. But we've moved to a state with a testing requirement, so that's what we do: spend three days in May taking turns in the quiet dining room, demonstrating what we know and what we don't in a series of blacked-in circles. The children regard it as a pleasant-enough ritual -- we went to Dollar Tree yesterday afternoon, to celebrate being finished -- and as I say, I figure I stand to learn things. Now, if only they'd create a reading-comprehension section devoted to Tintin . . .

Independent-Reading Lists: High School Senior

I have a feeling that I posted a partial list for Epiphany some weeks back, but here's the whole deal, to cover the summer and the next academic year:

I. Quick Reading (any historical fiction we might have missed in previous years: 
 Sun Slower, Sun Faster/Trevor
Ides of April/Ray
Any Louis de Wohl saint novel yet unread (not many of those left, apparently)

II. Prep for Chemistry/Other Science: 
The Mystery of the Periodic Table/Wiker
Darwin's Black Box/Behe
Insects/Fabre
King Solomon's Ring/Lorenz

III. Literature
Kristin Lavransdatter/Undset
O Pioneers!/My Antonia/The Song of the Lark/Cather
The Red Badge of Courage/Crane
The Age of Innocence/Wharton
Mrs. Dalloway/Woolf
Murder in the Cathedral/The Cocktail Party/T. S. Eliot
Excellent Women/Pym
Till We Have Faces/Lewis
Middlemarch/G. Eliot
Animal Farm/Orwell
The Man Who Was Thursday/Chesterton
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich/Solzhenitsyn

Like most of my lesson plans, it's a list done in pencil, and there's room to add more. What have I left off?

The Girlie Swing-Dancing at the Ceili Prom

Or, Good Time Had By All. Her dress was deliciously swirly, as you can see;  she was danced off her feet for four hours straight, and she and her friend Geoffrey got to demonstrate their killer tango for the entire group.

In the background you can barely see a refreshment table covered with one of a number of green tulle panels with which our bedroom window used to be swathed. Oh, the uses to which one can put Miss Ellen's poteers, if one is ingenious . . .

And oh, the fun of being sixteen and having just taken a semester of ballroom dance lessons. If you want to know how to feel that you rule the world, at least for a night, I think this is how.

(many thanks to Geoffrey's mom, Karen, who took this photo)

The Week's Agenda, plus a literary question

What we're doing this week: 

1. Standardized testing:  we use the California Achievement Test, from Seton Testing Services, which will score our papers and return our results to us in roughly two weeks. We do two tests a day for each grade level;  I proctor Epiphany and Amicus together, because procedures are the same for both their levels, while Helier and Crispina test with me one-on-one. As last year's testing confirmed, it's all a bit of an exercise in what I already knew about each child, but aside from being a state mandate, it's both useful and reassuring to see the percentiles on paper.

2. Having students to dinner. Tonight. Do I know what we're having to eat? Nope . . . but Crispina is cheerfully cleaning the downstairs bathroom for me as I write (really what I'm doing here is supervising, without looking as though I'm supervising), and all manner of thing shall be well, I'm sure.

3. Book group to discuss Hannah Coulter tomorrow night.

4. Boy Scouts (tonight)

5. Cub Scouts (tomorrow night)

6. Choir (Wednesday night)

7. Latin Mass and Holy Hour (Thursday);  daily Mass at least two other days as well

8. College graduation (Saturday), plus other faculty-attendance-recommended events earlier in the week

9. Work on a print project which I really need to finish

10. Gardening

I think that that about covers it. Over the weekend, Aelred brought home a large desk calendar (one of those blotter-sized ones) plus a sheet of foamboard, onto which he proceeded to affix the June, July, and August pages of the calendar. The result is a gigantic all-summer calendar on the kitchen wall, onto which we have already recorded Scout camp, two other Scout trips, Cub Scout daycamp, a Totus Tuus week at church, Epiphany's two weeks at UDallas, Aelred's Fides et Ratio seminar, and more. Every time I look at this calendar, I have to sit down -- and it doesn't even cover this month, which is just as exhausting.

Meanwhile, at First Things, Micah Mattix asks, "Whither Walker Percy?"

Along with Flannery O’Connor, he is often considered one of the leading Catholic writers of the South in the twentieth century. His work—from the National Book Award winning The Moviegoer to the fast-paced The Thanatos Syndrome—captures the malaise and potential absurdity and horror of a post-Christian America with compassionate aplomb. Yet, while interest in O’Connor continues to grow, interest in Percy has plateaued somewhat.

Why? Says Mattix,

[I]t seems to me—and it pains me to say this because I am an ardent Percy fan—that interest in O’Connor outstrips interest in Percy because she is simply the better fiction writer. She is a purist and he is a hodgepodge of novelist, essayist, philosopher, and man of science.

You'll want to read the whole short essay. Comments so far are illuminating as well;  one commenter's connecting dots between Percy and G. K. Chesterton seems especially apt to me. I've got to turn over the computer to a math DVD right now and can't discuss further, at least until later, but your thoughts are most welcome.

Happy Mother's Day UPDATED

In England Mother's Day -- or Mothering Sunday -- happens during Lent, on the Sunday we also call Laetare or Refreshment Sunday. It's a bit of quickening just as the season begins to drag;  at our parish in Cambridge, the children greeted mothers at the door with little foil-wrapped nosegays of spring flowers and lavender and rosemary which sweetened the cold air all through Mass.

Here, as much as the greeting-card-industry-drivenness of the holiday makes me roll my eyes a little, I do like that we celebrate mothers in the month of the Blessed Mother. It is all of a piece:  the yes that you've said to life, whether you were precisely planning your own life around that one or not;  the willingness to participate in a story larger than your own;  the queenship you assume within that story, if that's not too over-the-top a thing to say. I'm not trying to be self-congratulatory here, or to inflate with artificial grandeur what's only been going on since the dawn of mankind, but one day out of the year it's nice to meditate on what ought, really, to be a daily state of affairs. Even Jesus, after all, did what His mother told him, which is why that wedding at Cana turned out so smashingly well. Any mother's reward for all her sacrifice should be the loyal service of her -- well, the people who've been cleaning my house all day while I dug happily in the garden would like to intimate that maybe I should not let myself get swept away on this tide of -- it's theology, folks. And it's on my side here. Is that bathroom clean yet?

Here are some links to complete your day:

A characteristically provocative Mother's Day post from The Anchoress.

Ay-mayzing Mother's Day cakes at Cake Wrecks (plus some interesting commentary on what they might nor might not suggest about women's roles).

Betty -- a talented and thoughtful mother herself -- loves the Babies movie.

Something pretty fabulous from Pentimento (yet another talented and thoughtful mother).

A sweet young correspondent of mine ponders, post by post, the prospect of motherhood.

At House Art Journal, a llama mama!

UPDATE:  Baby Llama Thriving

I'd add more, but he whose day approacheth, yea, in June, desireth my company on a dog walk.

Happy happy to all the mothers out there!

PS:  I loved the progression of these pictures:  the Visitation, at the top, with its two miraculous mothers;   and above, Saint Anne expecting the Blessed Virgin Mary (with her own built-in ultrasound!).

Speaking of, here's a remarkable site featuring film footage of babies in utero at every stage of development. Hiccups at 6-8 weeks' gestation, thumb-sucking, yawning, and response to touch at 8-10 weeks, responding to sound at 3-6 months . . . all pretty fascinating and, well, human. H/T

PPS:   Almost forgot! Congratulations to my friend K and her family:  her youngest daughter and her husband arrived home on Mother's Day, appropriately enough, with their two-year-old daughter plus their newly-adopted baby son from Ethiopia. Everything I said about saying yes to life applies to adoptive mothers as well, including my mother-in-law, and to birth mothers, like my husband's, whose names their children and grandchildren may never know, who let the story happen, and whose crowns are kept with God.

PPPS:  I never yell at them? (but yes, I did, and do, think the super-glue incident was funny.) 

Sniff . . . why does love make you cry? 

Nesting

The baby wrens have flown the bird bottle, but now we have catbirds nesting in the bend of the back-porch gutter downspout, and in the forsythia outside our sunroom window: 

This is an old and venerable forsythia and, as I noticed the other day, has been largely a tangle of dead wood. I didn't discover the catbird's nest until I'd already pruned away a lot of old canes;  if I'd known the nest was there, I wouldn't have touched the bush, and I was filled with remorse at having disturbed it. The mother, however, seems to be hanging around;  she seems unfazed by the increased exposure, so we're watching from the window and hoping for the best.

Latin and Vegetables

Some years ago, when he was but newly arrived in this part of the world, our parish priest was motoring through the countryside when he saw, in a front yard along the highway, a sign bearing a hand-painted motto in Latin. Well, he thought, this is impressive. As he drove along, he made a mental game of translating the motto. Mater he knew, of course, but the second word had him flummoxed. He tried conjugating it. He tried declining it. He combed through his mental stock of Latin nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, idioms -- nothing. It remained impenetrable, this word stakes . . . stakes . . . stakes . . .

Until the penny dropped, and he realized that MATER STAKES wasn't Latin for anything.

Here's a shot of our vegetable garden, tucked between the house and the driveway. Notice the string trellises, made with -- you guessed it -- mater stakes, the mother of all sticks.

It does look a bit of a mess right now. I didn't mean to have sunflowers coming up in a clump in the middle of the corn, but the clearly the seeds had other ideas. In case you can't tell, what you're looking at here are, from front to back, bell peppers. corn, (an unplanned clump of sunflowers), more corn with runner beans dwarfing it at the moment -- my vision was that the runner beans would climb up the corn, but they seem more intent on taking over the world -- sweet banana peppers, wax beans, two rows of tomatoes, and black-eyed peas, all interplanted with marigolds and nasturtiums. The vinca crop, as you can see, is flourishing.

What I Learned This Week By Opening One Book

The book:  Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry

When they were young, I suppose all my thoughts about the children started with knowing they were mine. Because they were mine, I had to think of what I should do for them, of what Nathan and I could do for them to get them started in the world. Now all my thoughts about them start with knowing they are gone.

. . .

I take some blame on myself for this. Maybe, given the times and fashions, it couldn't have happened any other way. But I am sorry for my gullibility, my lack of foreknowledge, my foolish surprise at the way it turned out. Grandmam, who never went to high school, was desperate for me to go to  high school. And I, who never went to college, was desperate for my children to go to college. Nathan, who also had never been to college, was less ambitious for the children than I was, but he agreed with me. We both wanted to send them to college, because we felt we owed it to them. That was the way we explained it to ourselves . . . It just never occurred to either of us that we would lose them that way. The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children's education.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else.

This isn't information I learned, exactly, but an idea I'm chewing on. Intimately bound up in my children's education, and asking myself all the time not only what to do, but what it's for,  I do think about this:  if they go away, they'll never come home.

And, well, if they do and they don't, they do and they don't, and it will be something of myself to sacrifice. On the other hand, I have let them know that I would be perfectly happy and proud of them if they lived around the corner from me and brought my many grandchildren to play in my house every day. I've told them this not only out of selfishness -- though it's an idea not unalloyed by selfishness -- but because sometimes I think that people need permission not to strive for greatness, whatever exactly that is, when what will make them happy is not to be great or striving, but to live simply with, and near, people they love.

Anyway, that's what I've been reading, and that's what's in my mind. You?

Related:  A meditation on Mariette in Ecstasy.
MM with some biblical textual exegesis.

Meanwhile, you can revisit great posts from previous weeks, and if you've happened to write a book post lately, you're welcome to add it below: