Tidbits From Our Summer Reading

Wandering about the house the other day, I happened upon one of the books which Aelred is currently reading, face-down on a table. I picked it up and read the following, which I found fascinating and offer for possible discussion:

"What is the purpose of religion?" asked the deists, and their answer was that the aim of religion was to make men virtuous. And how are men to be made virtuous? By the acceptance of certain sound general principles men could become good;  natural religion would accept, as generally valid principles, belief in God, in human immortality, and in some system of rewards and punishments after death . . . How are these principles to be learned? The answer is that they are self-evident, as can be seen from their general acceptance in all the religions and all the countries of the earth. Locke had already remarked that the moral teachings of all the religions were much the same, and that Christianity had only the advantage of presenting them in a more orderly and coordinated form. But, if such principles are self-evident, there is no need for a special revelation;  and the traditional Christian arguments from miracle and from prophecy are irrelevances and inconveniences rather than aids to true religion.

At this distance of time, we can see that the defect of all forms of deism was that they treated religion as being a system of ideas and a code of moral precepts. The heart of the Christian faith is personal communion with a living God, redemption from sin, and the redemption of history through the personal interposition of God Himself in it through the Incarnation. But part of the difficulty experienced by the Church in answering the deists was that most of the champions of the Church had themselves come to think in the same categories as the deists, and were therefore at a great disadvantage in meeting an adversary whose use of the available weapons was perhaps more skilful than their own. 

from Anglicanism, by Stephen Neill

Now, I found this interesting as both an unpacking of the rationalist approach to religion -- follow the instructions (any instructions, really) for desired result -- and in the second paragraph especially, as a template  for describing, potentially, all kinds of current phenomena in the broader culture of Christianity (if that makes sense at all --  friends  don't let friends think without coffee, but you aren't here, and the coffee-making friend of my right hand has only now arisen to take on the day).

And then yesterday I read the following passage, from Chesterton, of course, which delighted me no end. In it, Saint Thomas Aquinas has been sent to France, to the court of King Louis IX, later Saint Louis. As Chesterton says,

In the old pagan proverb about kings being philosophers or philosophers kings, there was a certain miscalculation, connected with a mystery which only Christianity could reveal. For while it is possible for a king to wish very much to be a saint, it is not possible for a saint to wish very much to be a king.  

Now, that's pretty felicitous in itself, but the anecdote about Aquinas which it frames is even better. He goes with great reluctance, ordered by his superiors, to Paris, where he finds himself at a royal banquet.

Somehow they steered that reluctant bulk of reflection to a seat in the royal banquet hall;  and all that we know of Thomas tells us that he was perfectly courteous to those who spoke to him, but spoke little, and was soon forgotten in the most brilliant and noisy clatter in the world:  the noise of French talking. What the Frenchmen were talking about we do not know, but they forgot all about the large fat Italian in their midst, and it seems only too possible that he forgot all about them.  Sudden silences will occur even in French conversation;  and in one of these the interruption came . . .

And then suddenly the goblets leapt and rattled on the board and the great table shook, for the friar had brought down his huge fist like a club of stone, with a crash that startled everyone like an explosion;  and had cried out in a strong voice, but like a man in the grip of a dream, "And that will settle the Manichees!"

from Chesterton's Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi 

The anecdote concludes with the king's sending an emissary down the tables to find out what argument was playing itself out in Thomas's head and write it down, because it must have been a good one, and the philosopher might forget it.




Meanwhile, Epiphany's reading list from Dallas has come at last, so she is feverishly devouring Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Oedipus Rex, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Henry V, Cymbeline, the Book of Job, and some Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. We have her booked on a cheap flight -- 2 stops, one change, which may be a kind of baptism by fire into the adventures of traveling alone -- to go and discuss all these things, beginning two weeks from tomorrow.

And there's a second chapter up at the story blog. Summer writing proceeds . . . maybe not exactly apace, but it's creeping along in something like the right direction. You are welcome to come and read;  just drop me an email, and I'll send you an invitation.

Serial Fiction, Anyone? UPDATED

I've been pondering setting up a new blog for the purpose of publishing sections of the "young-adult" story I shared the other day here. Readership would be via email invitation -- if I'm going to post a lot of this kind of writing in an online format, I don't think I want unlimited public exposure. Still, having readers is a motivating thing, and I think I'd be more likely to plow on with the story if I thought anybody else cared how it might turn out.

I'm not sure when I'll get it up and going, but if you'd be interested in reading, drop me an email  -- sallytslc at hotmail dot com -- and I'll send you an invitation.

UPDATE:  The story blog is up.  First chapter is posted. More to come.

Meant to Post This Yesterday

Yesterday, of course, was the feast of Saint Paulinus of Nola, as well as of Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher, Martyrs.

Wrote Erasmus, in 1519,  of his friend Thomas More:

To begin then with what is least known to you, in stature he is not tall, though not remarkably short. His limbs are formed with such perfect symmetry as to leave nothing to be desired. His complexion is white, his face rather than pale and though by no means ruddy, a faint flush of pink appears beneath the whiteness of his skin. His hair is dark brown or brownish black. The eyes are grayish blue, with some spots, a kind which betokens singular talent, and among the English is considered attractive, whereas Germans generally prefer black. It is said that none are so free of vice. His countenance is in harmony with his character, being always expressive of an amiable joyousness, and even an incipient laughter and, to speak candidly, it is better framed for gladness than for gravity or dignity, though without any approach to folly or buffoonery. The right shoulder is a little higher than the left, especially when he walks. This is not a defect of birth, but the result of habit such as we often contract. In the rest of his person there is nothing to offend . . .He seems born and framed for friendship, and is a most faithful and enduring friend . . .When he finds any sincere and according to his heart, he so delights in their society. In human affairs there is nothing from which he does not extract enjoyment, even from things that are most serious. If he converses with the learned and judicious, he delights in their talent, if with the ignorant and foolish, he enjoys their stupidity. He is not even offended by professional jesters. With a wonderful dexterity he accommodates himself to every disposition. As a rule, in talking with women, even with his own wife, he is full of jokes and banter. No one is less led by the opinions of the crowd, yet no one departs less from common sense . . .  (H/T)

More was a remarkable figure by all accounts, notably that of his son-in-law William Roper, husband to More's daughter Margaret,  with whom, among all his children, More shared a particularly intimate understanding. Drawn initially to the monastic life, he settled at last into a vocation to the married state, and into politics, which he viewed as a means of discharging his duty to his country. He seems from the beginning not to have minded shooting himself in the foot politically:

One of More's first acts in Parliament had been to urge a decrease in a proposed appropriation for King Henry VII. In revenge, the King had imprisoned More's father and not released him until a fine was paid and More himself had withdrawn from public life. (read more)

 Later, as we all know, he re-entered that life, beginning as undersheriff of London -- a role in which he gained a reputation for impartial justice and compassion for the poor -- and ending as Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor. He was a famous opponent of Luther and the Protestant Reformation, in a time when religious dissent and treason were conflated into one offense and punished with the usual brutality of the age. In his lifetime, More heatedly denied rumors that he had personally ill-treated Protestants, and though those rumors were later given more or less immortal status via Foxe's Book of Martyrs, it is worth considering that their subject seems in general to have been a man of his word, given to decency rather than cruelty. His greatest stringency and sense of penance was reserved for himself;  beneath the opulent dress of the public man, he habitually wore a hair shirt.

Unusually for the time, he believed in the value of education for women and took great pride in the intellectual gifts of his daughters, whom he taught himself in a room his family called the Academia.


 The Anchoress offers as a podcast a letter written to his cherished daughter Margaret during his last imprisonment. Here's an excerpt which, as one Anchoress commenter points out, serves well as a prayer:

Though I shall feel myself weakening and on the verge of being overcome with fear,  I shall remember how Saint Peter at a blast of wind began to sink because of his lack of faith, and I shall do as he did: call upon Christ and pray to him for help. And then I trust he shall place his holy hand on me and in the stormy seas hold me up from drowning.

In Cambridge, the windows of our flat looked west across a common to the Catholic Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs. That spire formed our horizon, and I can't help thinking that they had us in their sights, too, all the while.

See also Peter Ackyroyd's Life of Thomas More: 
 

Blogs, Writing, and More Writing

Melanie B. and I have been having an interesting conversation about the role of the blog in the writer's life:  what blogging motivates and enables us to do, what its parameters might be for each of us.

While I'm on the subject of writers and writing, trawling Arts and Letters Daily this morning has turned up some fascinating tidbits, which I offer without comment: Dickens as modern travel writer, mild-mannered civil servant as poet, Germaine Greer as old-wives-tale-teller,  Ayn Rand at odds with reality, Emily Dickinson as Delphic Oracle, Jane Austen as brand.

Finally,  to inure myself (again) to the idea that if I try to write fiction, it's because I want somebody someday to read it, here's a slice of what I worked on this weekend:

Between last fall’s drowned leaves and a  liquid white shifting sky, a few fat red carp hung like carbuncles in the icy atmosphere of the pond. Maris, on her way to the kitchen gardens, stabbed at the water’s surface with a wand she had stripped from the tangled forsythia outside the hall door. At this disturbance, the carp drifted upward, fanning their pectoral fins, in hopes that the offending stick might turn out to be a mosquito.

Alas for them. The air through which Maris swam in her billowing blue smock was as purely cold as the water. Beneath the blue of her kerchief, her cheeks were pink. On the flagged path, her feet in their wooden clogs reported like an axe smiting a tree.

“Too bad,” she said to the carp. Then she was off, swinging her basket, to dig the potatoes and onions for breakfast.

The kitchen garden, within its woven-stick fence, lay in tidy squares like a chessboard:  here the first green threads of chives, there a surviving kale from last year, frilling up through the leafmold.  Maris’s eye wandered over the square which in summer would brim with the starry gold of Jerusalem artichoke, and beyond that, the square where tomatoes, woven into their string trellises, would droop with meaty red globes.

The very thought of them made Maris’s mouth water and her stomach glug. All winter long the community ate brown bread and water and the everlasting potatoes and onions. “White food for a white season,” Mother Gret always said, though snow was sparing enough in that part of the world. In the autumn – a good red-and-yellow season – Maris liked potatoes and onions, but by February, every year, she found herself wishing that the maker of the world had thought to make colored food for the winter.

“Well,” she reminded herself, “we do have carrots sometimes.” Sister Cook had put them in the soup last night. They had turned the familiar potato-water pottage a heartening orange. On the other hand, the maker of the world had also made cabbage:   more dispiriting than potatoes and not half as filling.

Wake up, little springtime, chanted Maris softly to herself as she knelt in the dirt and dug for onions with her fingers. Wake up from your bed.  She finger-combed each onion’s languid brown hair, then felt down to the root of it and farther, to the cold white bulge beneath the crumbling topsoil. They weren’t so bad, really. Sister Cook would fry them in butter till their edges browned and light shone through their middles. If Maris picked some rosemary on her way back, that would be roasted with the potatoes, and the hall would smell sharply of it all day long.

Ancient beyond anybody’s telling, the little cluster of buildings lay softly decaying in their green fold of land. To the west the mountains, ancient and worn and gentle themselves, shrugged their rounded shoulders against the sky. From there the lands rolled downhill like a bolt of fluid green silk which gathered at last in wooded rucks and ridges on the level plateau, further creased by placid brown rivers. A sister standing on the long back porch of the Abas, the living-building, could look straight out across a restless rooftop of young hardwood forest and see in one direction the mountains, and in the other, on the horizon’s slate-blue boundary, the skeletal remains of three towers marking the grave of a city.

It was a place of mystery and of tall tales. Nobody could say with any certainty how long ago the towers had been built, who had lived there, what had driven them away. Maris knew a sister who had killed a snake on the path by throwing her shoe at it, and she had once seen a man who, so they said, had been savaged by a bear in the mountains – that was why he walked with a stick  -- but she did not know anyone who had ever known anyone who had been to those towers, or would admit it if they had.

The travelers who came that way and stopped to sup in the Hall had little to tell. “It was something once,” Maris had heard a man say, shaking his head as he crumbled brown bread into his cabbage soup. She remembered the night:  autumn, rain whipping the black windows. The hens were still laying then, and the soup and bread had been followed by an egg apiece for all at table.

“Yes, sir,” the stranger had said – an odd thing to say to a table full of women. “Ever body says it was a sight in its day. I come around the long way, through the woods. There’s straight roads still, they say, for them that wants to take ‘em. Not me. Not for love nor money.”

“Why not?” That was Brini, her dark eyes sparkling mischief above the rim of her cup. She was Maris’s age, or as near to it as anyone could guess. They had been foundlings the same year, the year the goats all died of an influenza, and had grown up, thirteen summers, sharing the same narrow high-windowed room under the Abas roof, at the top of the frail old stairs. At table Maris ate dumbly and hardly spoke when spoken to. It was Brini who asked saucily, “Why?” And, “Why not?”

“Why wouldn’t you take those roads?” she had asked the man.

“Because I don’t court bad luck, young lady,” the man had answered tersely, tapping his egg with the butt of his folding knife.

Though she did not look up from her soup, Maris had wondered at the strange things people said. Mother Gret was often heard to remark that she could eat up Vic and all her puppies. She meant that she was hungry, but – who was Vic? That was what Maris wanted to know. And while she knew love,  what on earth was money?

So you can enjoy chewing on that. We have company coming, and I'm hoping to get some more alone-writing done, but will be back.

If Everyone Can't Be Friends, Then No One Can

For the last day or so I've been mulling over this article  from Wednesday's New York Times online, in which educational experts propose that children don't need intimate "best" friendships.

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.


“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”


“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

I've written before about the intense emotional flavor of children's friendships, particularly among girls, many of whom -- my own included -- demonstrate a remarkable capacity for serial exclusivity. Much is made of the feminine talent for multitasking, but friendship is where that talent all too often hits the wall, the general rule being that a girl with  two friends can't be friends with both at the same time.

My group of high-school friends had several concentric layers:  a herd of about ten girls who hung out together by tacit agreement that a Friday night spent in each other's company was not a Friday night wasted;  a knot of five who could always be depended on to get each other's jokes;  and within that five, a shifting network of twosomes.

In the summertime, I might spend three days straight with a particular friend, alternating nights at each other's houses, going swimming or shopping or lying under the window unit in the bedroom, talking. During those three days, all I would want in the world was the company of that friend. All other friendships would seem as vain pursuits, all other friends as annoying and inferior, particularly in their understanding of me.


And then we'd get sick of each other, or our mothers would get sick of driving us back and forth. We'd drift back into our regular routines, only to repeat the performance with other friends the next week. As far as I can recall, there was nothing particularly hurtful about this pattern;  what went around came around, and in fact, those friendships endure to this day. Whatever fallout there was from these assignations and breakups has long since been forgiven, and what astonishes me now, every time I see one of these friends -- even if it's been ten years -- is how much I know about her, how familiar she is to me, her gestures, her laugh, her habits which remain unaltered by the alien vesture of her adult life. There might be much about her everyday existence, her marriage and children and work, which will remain forever a closed book to me, and yet I know this person. However strange we might become to each other, I will always greet her with joy, as part of myself.


I think The Anchoress is onto something when she says,

This isn’t about what’s good for the children; it is about being better able to control adults by stripping from them any training in intimacy and interpersonal trust. Don’t let two people get together and separate themselves from the pack, or they might do something subversive, like…think differently.
 
This move against “best friends” is ultimately about preventing individuals from nurturing and expanding their individuality. It is about training our future adults to be unable to exist outside of the pack, the collective.

I also think that this is, perhaps less sinisterly, another instance of adults' stepping into micromanage what ought largely to be left alone.  Having more or less exhausted our capacity for ensuring children's physical safety, now we're lobbying for emotional helmet laws as well.

One phenomenon which I've noticed in recent years, and which I attribute at least in part to our cultural obsession with helmets and knee pads and booster seats for 9-year-olds, is that many of my teenaged daughter's peers are afraid to drive. Their sixteenth birthdays come and go, and they don't . . . really . . . care . . .  whether they ever drive themselves anywhere or not. We know young adults of voting age who have never driven -- though they're licensed drivers -- on an interstate highway. (To be honest, my own 16-year-old doesn't have a driver's license, either, but that's because it took her parents a long time to get her into driver's ed, and now she has to have a learner's permit for an entire calendar year before she can drive alone. Still . . . ). On the one hand, caution is good, of course. On the other hand, if we all thought too much about the statistical dangers of climbing into a car, nobody would ever go anywhere. And I do wonder what's going to happen to all these sixteen-to-twenty-year-olds when their mothers aren't around to drive them places.

I also wonder what's going to happen to children when the adults in their lives intimate to them that one-on-one friendship is something suspect, tantamount in itself to bullying, and therefore to be avoided.

An aside:  This also seems to me like one more instance of imposing on children, "for their own good," something up with which a grownup would not put.


Another aside:  As I responded to another Anchoress reader's critique of the limitations of homeschooling, there's not actually anything wrong with having siblings be your best friends. As it happens, all my children do have close friendships outside our family -- at this writing Amicus is sweltering away happily, I presume, with several of his on a Scout trip to the site of the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Having been sustained, ourselves, by intense friendships in childhood and adolescence, Aelred and I both encourage this kind of thing actively.

But the fact that our children take pleasure in each other's company at home is pure gold. I might have spent time this week setting up separate play dates for today for both Helier and Crispina, and time today driving them to and from said playdates, and that would have been an okay way to use up the day. But right now I'm sitting here watching them through the window:  they're both up in the crotch of our huge old pecan tree, playing some game involving the zipline (they're now both so tall that ziplining means stepping down out of the tree and walking across the yard with hands upraised, like people going to jail), and I think, Why would I have bothered? and Boy, am I glad I didn't. 

Praying for Beth

As many readers will know, a friend of mine from high school underwent, around Easter, an experimental treatment, the cultivation and transplant of her own stem cells, as part of a long battle against cancer. She is back at home, going to work and picking up her life, but under a shadow of fear. First of all, her recovery has been discouragingly slow, with her bloodwork still not close to normal, her energy level low, and her body responding badly to medications she can't not take. Also, she still has to undergo testing which will determine whether or not her treatment has worked:  in short, whether she will get well and live longer, or get sicker and die sooner.

The date for this crucial scan is July 12. Meanwhile, her latest CaringBridge journal entry would seem to suggest that her spirit has been suffering especially heavily today. Please join me in praying for her peace and healing.

Various Enterprises

Longtime readers will know that we here at Castle in the Sea have been hawking Mystic Monk Coffee for some months now, as a gesture of support for a monastic community as well as a fundraiser for things like -- well, at the moment, tuition for a summer program at the University of Dallas, to help make up the difference between the carefully-hoarded babysitting earnings and the number at the bottom of the bill.

Life in the world is anxious-making that way sometimes -- this morning began, for example, with Helier's stepping on a rake and cutting open the bottom of his foot . (update:  fortunately, this time, no stitches, not even a tetanus shot. Deo gratias.) Another day, another emergency. Our doctor is heartily sick of seeing us, and if we're not careful, we can begin to drown in the worry that things like this inspire.

This is why, actually, I feel so strongly about supporting a community of contemplative monks. They are doing what I cannot, too often, stop and make myself do in the midst of all the panicking and tears:  Pray. They practice stillness, and the knowledge that God is God, for all the rest of us who struggle not to be frenetic. They intercede for us when we forget to ask things for ourselves. A hectic world needs a praying heart, and that's what these men and all their contemplative religious brothers and sisters are for. Day and night, in silence and invisibility, this is how they give themselves for us.

Of course, they also have to eat. Virtually every religious community runs some kind of self-sustenance business:  the Trappist monks of Huntsville, Utah, sell creamed honey, for example, while the Dominican Sisters of Summit, New Jersey sell homemade artisan soaps which are apparently marvelous and often arrive, so I hear,  with little handwritten notes from the Sisters who pack the orders. Alternatively, the cloistered mendicant Poor Clares, a community of whom have just relocated to our diocese, to Crispina's delight -- she loves to visit with the five lovely young Sisters, who aren't enclosed in their new house yet and whom we keep running into at various events -- have designated externs, whose vocation is to solicit donations for the community's support. As a friend of mine put it, they give the rest of us the opportunity to be generous, which is no small thing.

And, as you cannot not know by now, the Wyoming Carmelites roast coffee. This is Fair Trade organic coffee, of the same quality as that which you'd buy at an organic-foods co-op, and it's fantastic. Truly. The monks, as their site says, live their Rule by the exercise of manual labor to earn their daily bread;  their lived poverty is our gift in more ways than one. Whether you're looking for flavored or just plain coffee, a year's coffee-of-the-month subscription or a one-time gift, a mug* or a t-shirt or a CD of sublime Gregorian chant to ease you into the cares of the day, they've got what you need.

* I love their two-handled mugs. They say that drinking coffee with two hands is a longstanding Carmelite tradition, a gesture of "thanksgiving for the fruits of the harvest." As the body goes, so goes the soul, I always think;  if my hands are thankful, then my heart will learn thankfulness, too.

And, of course, if you purchase any Mystic Monks product through this site, a small percentage goes into the tuition fund, for which we will gladly drink our coffee two-handed.


While I'm on the subject of the tuition fund, I'll also offer a friendly reminder that all the Amazon links on this site are sponsored links, a.k.a. shameless advertising. Any Amazon purchase through a link on this site -- even if it's not the book I had linked to -- generates a few pennies in the ol' tuition tip jar.

In addition, we have a line of gift items available through our CafePress store, featuring our original photographs. I'll soon be updating designs and offerings for the summer season, so if you wanted something with bluebells on it, this might be your last chance!

And finally, check out the summer offerings at my Usborne Books website:  cookbooks, "make and do" books, "things to spot" books for long car trips, Learning Palettes and Wrap-Ups and other summer "bridge" resources, Kid Kits, and more. Whether you're looking for summer birthday gifts or resources to keep children occupied through long, hot afternoons, I think we've probably got you covered.


Now, I am not by nature a salesperson, so I hasten to add that if you buy none of this, I will still love you. Writing is a slow business, however -- at least, real writing is for me -- so the rest of it's the day job I'm not giving up yet.


Meanwhile, you're here. For that alone I lift my coffee mug in a two-handed salute. Thanks.

Alone With the Writing

Via First Thoughts,  The New Republic's Jed Perl on the lost art of privacy in writing:

Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts. This is obviously true of forms such as the diary, which are inherently solitary. But even those of us who write for publication can conclude, once we have clarified certain thoughts, that these thoughts are not especially valuable, or are not entirely convincing, or perhaps are simply not thoughts we want to share with others, at least not now. For many of us who love the act of writing—even when we are writing against a deadline with an editor waiting for the copy—there is something monastic about the process, a confrontation with one’s thoughts that has a value apart from the proximity or even perhaps the desirability of any other reader. I believe that most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page. When I think about the writers I loved to read when I was in high school and college, I know what mattered most to me was the one-on-one relationship I felt I was developing with the writer’s thoughts. It was fantastic to feel I was alone with a writer, engaged in a splendid intellectual or imaginative conversation.

Adds David Mills:

Those of you who write may find his short reflection of interest. As someone who both writes and edits, I would add to his reflection that even someone who’s called to write — the religious believer, for example, who feels his gift as a Divine calling — ought to write first to please himself. This is what Flannery O’Connor did, and how C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien came to write their fantasy classics.

But I don’t mean — boy I don’t mean — writing self-indulgently, but writing something you would enjoy were it written by someone else, because you love the craft of writing and the truth you’re trying to convey. The prose itself and the insights it offers should please you primarily because they are good in themselves, not because they’re yours. That is what the craftsman does. He serves the work, as O’Connor and Dorothy Sayers both put it.

I certainly found it of interest, especially today as I stumbled upon yet another novel-in-progress in a notebook on my bedside table. It's more a "young-adult" kind of thing than the project I've been excerpting here, and I worked on it feverishly for a period in March before setting it aside. Picking it up again, I found myself drawn into the story, almost as if I hadn't made it up -- I say almost, because if it had been someone else's, I wouldn't have been making editorial notes and changes as I went. Also, what happens next would not be up to me. As it is, if I want to know how the story turns out, I have to write it.

Ditto the first story.  Things are getting crowded in my brain. Blogging will be light.

Summer Reading: June Edition

Epiphany:  

O Pioneers! 
The Age of Innocence
Darwin's Black Box
Mere Christianity

Amicus: 

The Scarlet Pimpernel 
The Weka-Feather Cloak


Helier: 

The Last Cowboys
Captains Courageous (read-aloud)
What Katy Did (read-aloud) 


Crispina: 

Captains Courageous
What Katy Did
(both read-alouds with Helier) 

Me: 

The Doctors of the Church, vol. 1
Leonie Martin:  A Difficult Life
St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi

Aelred: 

Uh . . . lots of stuff . . .   

P.S. I've been less than careful with my disclaimers lately, but as always, these book links are sponsored links. If you buy a book, we'll be vacationing on the Riviera . . . the Upper Catawba Riviera . . .  

A Wordless Feast

Still Life With Hymns and Penny

P.S. And appropos of nothing in this photograph, a big welcome to Elizabeth Foss and Momopoly readers. From now on  all my blog titles will include the words "acedia," "disembodiment," and "technology." Seriously, I'm glad you're here. Make yourselves at home, and come back often.

Actually, the world from here does look an awful lot like this photograph, an awful lot of the time . . .

Sacred Heart Lunch

Or;  Liturgical Cooking for Underachievers

Okay, really. We're talking "apple hearts," right? This would be fancy talk for "any idiot can cut an apple in half and say the seeds look sorta kinda like part of a crown of thorns, if you squint and wish real hard."

Cheddar cheese + different-sized heart-shaped cookie cutters =

fun for the whole domestic church.

The Tough Take Accounting

Or;  Why Nobody Likes the Humanities Any More

Today at First Things, Fr. Edward Oakes reviews a review of a book on what I suppose one could, without all that much hyperbole, call the humanities crisis. It's today's must-read.

The standard diagnosis now being invoked for explaining declining enrollment in college-level humanities courses is economic. Whereas in the sixties the lament placed the blame on the philistinism of American culture, now market forces are made the scapegoat.

As David Brooks deftly puts it in a recent column: “When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.” Adding to the chorus of lament, Harvard’s president Drew Faust worries that “the market model [has] become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education.”

Morson isn’t buying. Since he teaches the most popular humanities course at Northwestern, he has ample opportunity to ask his students why they avoid taking more such classes. “Not materialism but a nose for nonsense drives them away,” he finds. That nonsense takes three forms: condescension, literature taught as a crossword puzzle, and historicism.

By condescension Morson means the tired trope of measuring Shakespeare, Milton, or Tolstoy against “our” values, which of course would be the norms of the academic left. Should the author in question not have denounced heterosexism or colonialism, he is denounced as “reactionary.” In other words, read in this way, “literature can teach us nothing because it presumes that the truth is already given.”

More . . .

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Explanations of this devotion and the rituals attached to it here, here, and here.

Pray the Office for this Solemnity:  Lauds, Vespers, Office of Readings, and more. Many thanks to Melanie for calling my attention to this site, in a comment on a previous post. Note that the translations are a little odd at times;  on the free web pages they've had to post their own renderings of psalms, canticles, etc, for copyright reasons, but if you use the downloadable format, you get the Grail psalms and translations from the Jerusalem Bible.

Msgr. Pope ponders sentiment and strength.

Liturgical cooking at Catholic Cuisine.  

The Crescat notes Malta's consecration (as in, the whole country consecrated itself) to the Sacred Heart ten years ago this month.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, it's already tomorrow.

Happy feasting.

Margaret of Scotland

Queen, Mother, Benefactress, Saint

From today's reading, from the Extraodinary Form of the Mass:

A good wife who can find?

She is far more precious than jewels.

The heart of her husband trusts in her,

and he will have no lack of gain.

She does him good and not harm,

all the days of her life.

She seeks wool and flax,

and works with willing hands.

She is like the ships of the merchant,

she brings her food from afar.

She rises while it is yet night

and provides food for her household

and tasks for her maidens.

She considers a field and buys it;

with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.

She girds her loins with strength

and makes her arms strong.

She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.

Her lamp does not go out at night.

She puts her hands to the distaff,

and her hands to the spindle.

She opens her hand to the poor,

and reaches out her hand to the needy.

She is not afraid of snow for her household,

for all her household are clothed in scarlet.

She makes herself coverings;

her clothing is fine linen and purple.

Her husband is known in the gates,

when he sits among the elders of the land.

She makes linen garments and sells them;

she delivers girdles to the merchant.

Strength and dignity are her clothing,

and she laughs at the time to come.

She opens her mouth with wisdom,

and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

She looks well to the ways of her household,

and does not eat the bread of idleness.

Her children rise up and call her blessed;

her husband also, and he praises her:

"Many women have done excellently,

but you surpass them all."

Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,

but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.

Give her of the fruit of her hands,

and let her works praise her in the gates.

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Acedia and The Disembodiment of Technology

Recently I wrote about an "embodied day;" now at Betty Duffy there's an interesting conversation happening, about the ways in which, and the extent to which, technology disembodies us. I wonder about the role of internet use in acedia:

The spiritual paralysis of the powers of the soul. It is this state during which there is an absolute indifference to prayer and fasting and, in general, an inertia about the keeping of the commandments of the gospel. Since man is a psychophysical being, spiritual slothfulness is reflected in the body too. It is a psychophysical weakness and slackness. A psychophysical paralysis.

Kathleen Norris, some years ago, wrote a memoir detailing her own experience with acedia;  read an excerpt from the  memoir and some question-and-answer with Norris here. Among many other good things, she says,

Acedia is tricky. It can surface as boredom, but it can also attach itself to our busy schedules, making us too weary to care about much except the next task on the list. In caregiving I adopted the role of a woman warrior, and it worked for a while, especially during times of crisis. I got things done for the people I loved. But the eternal question that acedia asks—the "why bother?"—was always there, lurking in the shadows, suggesting that what I was doing was useless, and that there was no hope.

I often wonder, myself, about the extent to which the business -- the busyness -- of keeping a blog prevents me, or lets me off the hook, from doing what I really need to be doing, and writing what I really need to be writing. I will say this:  during the brief period when I was doing paid blogging, I was miserable. I'm not sure why. It was "work" in a much more real sense than this blog is, because I was making money doing it;  my family was seeing some return on the time I spent staring at the screen. Yet that's really what it felt like:  time spent staring at a screen, while real life went on around me. Writing this blog feels different, chiefly I suppose because I know I can walk away, and aside from maybe a handful of disappointed readers (not that I'm underestimaing your potential disappointment, O readers, or taking you for granted in any way!), I won't be letting anybody down, or failing to fulfill my end of a bargain.
 
Still . . . I wonder about time spent staring at a screen for any reason. Obviously I do it, and I'm really not gearing myself to stop (relax, O faithful remnant). But it seems to me that it becomes a kind of pseudo-routine which supplants real routines, which of course are the bane of the acedic. I get up in the morning and check my email, for example -- before and often instead of saying the Morning Office. A problem? I think so. I spend half an hour writing away at my novel, and then half an hour glancing for a second at Facebook. A problem? Well, it's not like I have half-hours to throw away.

Here it is nine-thirty, and I've: 
 
*checked my email
 
*written a small section of the novel
 
*looked at Facebook, because I want to see where Epiphany is right now, and wound up writing to someone about the restoration of the Frauenkirche in Dresden. I mean, I guess that was cool, but for that one conversation, there were about fifty more I could have had, and once you get started, when do you stop? (I try not to get started, which is why I may seem like an unfriendly Facebook friend)
 
*checked my sitemeter stats, because I'm a total dork. This sent me back to Betty Duffy's post. And now I'm here.

*ADDENDUM:  I also did a load of laundry, which is no small thing, because it's the chore which I most hate, and which is most apt to spiral out of control. Laundry-doing requires extra vigilance lately, as our old and cranky washing machine is in a phase of manifesting its age and crankiness in over-the-top ways. Right now you have to know when it hits a particular phase in its cycle, because there's a short or something in the lid switch, and if you don't go out and strike the machine a hearty blow in just the right place, it stops dead, and your laundry languishes all day in a tepid sudsy bath. Today, on top of all that, the whole thing overflowed, flooding the laundry room, shorting out the lamp we've rigged up for light because the ceiling light no longer works. If I have time to add this right now, it's because we're all very studiously staying out of Aelred and Amicus's way while they solve the problem.
 
I also had breakfast and coffee because Aelred brought them to me. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. Well, I'd have gotten up for the coffee. But I would not have made the effort to eat. Yesterday, when nobody was home with me all day, I got up at 7 but only remembered around noon that I hadn't had breakfast.
 
What I have not done:
 
*gotten actually dressed -- I just threw a jumper over my t-shirt when I got out of bed
 
*brushed my hair or my teeth
 
*bathed
 
*given my full attention to God via the Daily Office. I offer my writing when I sit down to do it, but that seems to me like an attempt to get some kind of twofer pass . . .
 
Okay, now that I've totally indicted myself, I can clearly see that I need to stand up and do what needs to be done. I can fight acedia by taking on those boring, routine things one at a time, deliberately. Sloth's opposing virtue, after all, is diligence, which is purely a matter of one foot in front of the other.
 
So I'll depart with this thought:  I'd be prone to acedia no matter what. But it seems to me that the internet, for all its undeniable benefits, can play right into the acedic's hands, and I wonder what to do about that.
 
Your thoughts?

The Voices in My Head Return

A rattle in the room, a small racket of blinds, and daylight, a paler darkness in her eyes.


“Who's there?” croaked Polly from her tangle of sheets.

“Ah, you’re awake, then. Hungry?” The voice was a man’s: familiar somehow, though all the people she had cared about were long gone away, she had thought.

She thrashed about in the bedclothes like a dolphin caught in a net. Soft footsteps approached and, with startling strength, lovely warm hands raised her and settled her against the pillows. “What’s the time?” she demanded.

“Breakfast time.”

“I never. I don’t eat breakfast. Bring me a cup of coffee and my packet of fags. I’ve work to do.”

A clink of crockery. “The lady of the house says no smoking in bed. But I’ve made you some decaf in a little espresso cup.“

“I like espresso in my espresso cup,” said Polly tartly.

“The lady says you can’t have espresso, darling. But drink this up, and let me help you eat something, and then if you’re a good girl I’ll bring you your pencil and your sketchpad.”

“I don't want them. I can't see to draw.”

“As you like.”

A spoonful of something was raised to her lips. She shut them firmly and turned her head away.

“Come on now,” coaxed the voice.

Polly loosed her lips to say, “I’m not a bloody baby.”

“Nobody said you were. But you won’t be good for much if you don’t eat.” In went the spoon. Something burned down Polly’s throat, utterly without taste. Unless heat was a taste, of course.

“I want something real to eat,” she spluttered.

Laughter. “What is real?”

I wish I knew, Polly thought. Aloud she merely said, “Let’s see whether that coffee tastes of anything but old armpits.” It tasted, she discovered, chiefly of milk, and she spat it out onto the blankets.

“How about I read to you?” the voice suggested.

“Story time,” mumbled Polly. Like a good child she subsided against her pillows and fell quiet.

My sons! Newest generation of this ancient city of Thebes!

While the voice rose and fell, Polly wandered back into herself, down a long gallery hung with pictures.

She stopped before one: a laughing darkhaired man with a chisel in his hand.

“Where have you been, carissima?” he asked her.

“Where have you been, that’s the question,” retorted Polly. She studied his image carefully. There was something familiar in the brush strokes – of course, they were her own. She had drawn him first that day she’d gone to his workshop. Standing in the doorway, pencil in hand, watching him work, sun on her bare head, she had roughed in the S-curve of his spine, his upraised hand with the mallet, his weight shifted onto one leg. He had been humming a tune she didn't recognize. The strokes of her brush, as she gazed at the painting, were full of that tune. Even in middle age, his hair silvering, he had had a boy’s elastic grace, a boy’s almost feminine prettiness. She had loved to watch him. Even now . . . She leaned against the door as he turned away from her into his work. Tap tap tap went the mallet against the chisel, and flakes of stone fell away. Or was he tapping at her door, and were those her clothes – her dress, her teddies, her stockings and garters – which flaked away and fell to the floor? Or was it his studio door someone rapped at, a woman, rattling the knob, calling his name? Painting him, she had wiped away all the inconvenient history so that he stood before her free of it all, rejoicing in his freedom.

His image dissolved in its frame, and she found herself looking at a boy, fourteen perhaps, who stood dressed in pyjama trousers, with his back to her, meditating in the kitchen doorway. She regarded the concavity of his smooth bare back, his black hair curling up at the ends, and for a moment she wanted to eat him alive, the little god. Then she remembered that he was her grandson Owen.

“God, look at you,” she said, because she always spoke her thoughts aloud, and, "What's happened to your mother?"

He did not look at her or answer her question. “Sophie’s had to take back her fiddle. You said you’d pay for it, and you didn’t.”

“I will, darling, don’t worry.” Polly fumbled about her for a fag.

“It’s too late, Gran.” His voice roughened. “They sent notices and notices. And they won’t let her have it again.”

Polly struck a match. “She’s a grown girl. A little disappointment won’t hurt her.”

“Disappointment?” He turned to look at her coldly. “What if, Gran, somebody had let you have all your brushes and canvases and paints and things on a loan – say I was supposed to pay for it, so that you could go on painting? What if I thought I’d rather have something else, and I had the money in my pocket to pay for your things, but I bought my things instead, and the shop came and made you bring back yours. Tell me, Gran,” he said. “Would you be disappointed?”

“You make me sound a monster,” said Polly.

He turned his back on her again and stood in the doorway as if walking into the kitchen were an action requiring serious forethought.

“I didn’t buy things for myself,” she said.

The boy said nothing.

Polly shook herself. Were the whole summer holidays going to take this tone? “This is bloody unpleasant,” she declared.

“All right, I’ll stop,” said the voice at her elbow. “Want me to stay with you, or do you want to sleep?”

Polly’s hand, on the coverlet, rose of itself and pawed in the direction of the voice. “Stay,” she heard herself saying. Then, "Go away."



Ruth was standing over a sinkful of cut flowers, a phalanx of crystal vases arrayed on the drain board at her elbow, when Michael returned with Polly’s breakfast tray.

Ruth glanced at the uneaten porridge and raised an eyebrow.

“She didn’t want to eat,” Michael said, setting the tray on the table.

“Did you try to make her?”

“How can I make her?” He picked up the cigarette packet and shook it. “Mum.”

“It’s a filthy habit anyway.” She held up a cluster of blooms: narcissi and freesia from the florist’s, winter jasmine she’d cut from the garden. “What do you think?”

He shrugged. “Mind if I go out for a bit?”

Ruth turned to face him, her hands still dripping with flowers. “To do what, may I ask? I’ve got a long list of chores for you.”

“That’s all right. I won’t be long. Let me take the list, and I’ll have it done by – “

“Noon?”

“Easy.”

She put down the flowers and fished in her pockets for the list, which he plucked from her fingers and read. “Cake. Wine. Sausage rolls – “ It was his turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Well,” she said defensively, “people eat them.”

“Indeed they do. Prawns – what are you doing with prawns?”

“I have a smoked salmon already,” Ruth said, not listening. “Oh, bin liners. Get more bin liners, Michael. We’ve got to think about cleanup as well as the rest of it.”

“Bin. Liners.” Michael pulled a pen from the jar on the table and amended the list. “Anything else?”

“That’s it, I think. Everything else we’ve got already. Damn, there’s the phone.” As she reached for it, he edged out of the door, and she heard his retreating footsteps on the stairs.

“I’m sorry, love,” the nurse said from somewhere out beyond Fenstanton, where she lived. “But the doctor says my foot’s broken, and I’ve got to keep off it. Today of all days.”

“Yes.” Ruth began counting to ten in her mind.

“I did want to see her specially today. It’s a disappointment. And I hate to leave you short-handed. Today of all days,” she said again.

“It can’t be helped,” said Ruth, stopping at seven. Only after she’d hung up did she think to feel sorry for the nurse and her broken foot.

When the phone rang again, seconds later, it was Sophie. “Oh, Ruth,” she said, her voice feathery with anxiety, “has Alasdair rung you yet?”

“No," said Ruth. "Why? Is something wrong?"

"Oh, no, no, not that I know of. It's just that he said he'd ring you as he was setting out to fetch us -- Helena and the girls are coming here, and then we'll all drive to yours together -- and I wondered whether he'd rung, because that would mean he'd left, and then I'd know to put my coat on, you know -- "

"Well," Ruth said, "I don't know any more than you do. Sorry. Has Helena gotten there yet?”

“I’m waiting for her now. No, wait a moment." Sophie gave a self-deprecatory gasp. "I'm not. How stupid of me. Alasdair was fetching them first, and then they're all coming here to get me, and then we come to you. It's twenty-two minutes from Alasdair's to my house, but if he's stopping at Helena's, then that's another ten, at least. I needn't rush to put my coat on, then, I shouldn't think, should you?"

"I think you can sit down and watch television for a few minutes," said Ruth. "Are you bringing an extra tablecloth."

“Oh!” She could feel Sophie startle on the other end. “Why, I’d completely forgotten. I won't turn on the telly just yet. I’ll get it out now and put it on the bench by the door, with my handbag – or I'll --“

“Do that,” Ruth said, not unkindly. “And Sophie – there’s another wrinkle. The nurse just rang, and she’s broken her foot, and I don't know how we're going to manage Polly at the opening. I know there's lots of us, but I'd counted on stationing her someplace with Bobbie and letting them be.”

Sophie sighed a plangent little sigh. “I’ll talk it over with Helena and Alasdair. Perhaps we can -- oh!” she broke off with a cry. “They've just driven up. They didn't ring after all, how thoughtless of them. Alasdair's tootling the horn, and I haven't got my coat on. I must fly.”

“Tablecloth, Sophie,” Ruth shouted down the phone, while on Sophie’s end, the handset clattered into its cradle.

More Daily Doings

A lovely doll's tea party on the piano bench . . .

plus a phonics quiz show.

Nevair ze dull moment, Mademoiselle . . .

Dappled Things, June 2010

 

Glory be to God for

wax beans on the kitchen-sink windowsill,

nasturtiums,

daylight in a lily,

the sun-striving runner bean on its trellis.

Glory be to God for

the bottle garden

and the garden two bottles make against the sky.

Glory be to God

for every laborer in every vineyard.

In His temple, all are crying, "Glory!"

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

(with gratitude to the psalmist and Fr. Hopkins:  Glory be to God for them, too)

Summer Homeschooling Monday

Helier, Crispina, and I spent about an hour this morning doing the following: 

1. Helier and I did a brief -- 5 minutes or so -- piano lesson using the Simply Music DVD which some friends have lent us. More about our Simply Music experience in a minute. Meanwhile, Crispina worked at her handwriting lesson for the day and looked at this week's story in her reader.

2. After the piano lesson, we all said a decade of the Rosary.

3. I had put blank calendar pages in both their binders. As it happens, Crispina and I have been studying the effect of the silent e at the end of a word (or;  How Many Ways Can You Force a Vowel to Tell You Its Name?), so reading and writing the word "June" was a timely activity. We numbered the days of the month from Tuesday June 1 to Wednesday June 30 -- now we know how many days June has, and we've practiced writing tiny numbers clearly. Then we marked the major feasts of the month -- the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the 11th, the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the 12th -- with little illustrations, and  put in Amicus's Boy Scout Court of Honor and family birthdays. Later we'll color the days to correspond with the liturgical calendar. I was meaning to start this calendar thing as a monthly lesson in the fall, but then I asked myself, why not do it now? We'll keep the calenders in their work-in-progress binders till the end of the month, adding and embellishing as we go, then transfer them to the work-completed binders, where they will act as dividers. My aim is for us to be able to see clearly our progress from month to month.

4. When we were finished with our calendar pages for the day, Crispina pulled out her dry-erase pad and practiced writing new words from her reading, plus numbers and letters. She also worked the addition problems on the pad's math page. Helier did a workbook exercise in the use of the period at the end of a "telling" sentence and a review of subtraction facts to ten in math.

5. Helier went off to the study to read his current summer-reading book, The Last Cowboys, by Harry Horse. This is one a of a funny epistolary series in which a globetrotting grandfather and his eccentric dog Roo write home to a grandchild to describe their travels. In the chapter Helier read today, Roo steps on the telephone in the motel room and calls room service, purchasing many breakfasts and also some swimsuits. Then she and the grandfather decide that they want to take  "the famous Greyhound bus," but end up instead on a bus full of greyhounds. Narrating all this to me, Helier had to lean on the kitchen counter to keep himself from falling over laughing.

While he was reading and guffawing in the study, Crispina and I made lunch:  a large "full-meal" salad with lettuce, nasturtium leaves, cucumber, hardboiled eggs, and cheese. Crispina sliced the cucumber into quarters -- we had a little impromptu math lesson about fractions -- and tossed everything together.

6. We had lunch, and now the two of them are free to play.



Amicus has been reading The Scarlet Pimpernel, doing a lesson a day in his grammar text, and working on math, using the invaluable Math Tutor DVD when he gets stuck. We bought this used, for a review tool for Epiphany as well as an extra resource for Amicus, and it's been worth every penny of the approximately twenty bucks we spent. It's definitly a low-frills production;  as Epiphany says, what you're watching is a dude filming himself with one hand while  working math problems with the other and talking about them. It's a video, in other words, of a big pink arm which spends a lot of time erasing the board. Still, his explanations are clear, concise, and to the point, and he's helped her to re-learn a number of things she had forgotten.

At the same time, Amicus had been struggling with fractions -- the one thing that didn't go swimmingly on his achievement test --  but the ol' Math Tutor cleared his problems right up, and he's been breezing through fractions lessons in Saxon Algebra 1/2. 

He's also been working at the piano with the Simply Music DVD, and has mastered the first piece in both hands. Helier's more or less mastered the right hand, and we're working on putting the left with it. Crispina's frustration level is still so high that I'm not pushing lessons with her yet, though she's picked up a good bit by simply copying the boys. We have an electronic keyboard as well as a piano, and a favorite game at the moment for all of them is to play this dweeby little tune against various background music, and in different  "voices." Amicus has also taught himself "Ode to Joy" out of one of my old beginner books and likes to play it on the pipe organ setting.

All of this is very loud fun, and I'm sure our neighbors' affection for us is growing daily.

Meanwhile, Epiphany is in Rhode Island, laboring away at life in this lovely sea-captain's cottage on the water (the one on the right, that is, not the other one) . . .

I mean, you know how it is. Anyway, Newport is the place where the Robber Barons come to life as they never do in the pages of the history book.

She's also been to the Naval War Museum (her generous and benevolent host is a Navy man), and later today, so rumor has it, she might go sailing. Last night, when she rang up,  she let it drop that they're all wearing sweaters up there;  we're still working on our envy problem here.

Ah, even as I sat writing this, Amicus asked whether he couldn't watch the giant disembodied ar-  -- I mean, the Math Tutor -- for a bit. And who am I to stand -- or sit, as the case may be --  between a man and his education? Especially a man who this evening will be getting five merit badges, including plumbing,  at his Court of Honor . . . somewhere out there, there must be a Pipes Tutor DVD we could watch, too . . .

Newport photos courtesy of Miss Susan, by the way. If only my camera and I could teleport.

Corpus Christi at Saint Dymphna's

Okay, so I'm fast-forwarding past the explicitly religious part, but you know we did that. And it didn't feel fast-forwarded at the time. This is not a complaint, mind you, merely an observation.

At the end of Mass and the Eucharistic procession, in which we showed the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament to the world, or at least to whomever might, at ten-thirty on Sunday morning, have been passing by on the highway between Fiat and Valediction Springs, Father offered the congregation the opportunity either to sit down -- the Spanish Mass was due to start in fifteen minutes -- or else to go home. Outside the church I spent some tender last moments with my First Communicants, who all wanted to show me their Silly Bandz collections. I'm not sure I get the point of shaped rubber bands that you wear on your arm, where the shape doesn't show so much, especially once you're wearing forty-two of them, but it is kind of interesting to watch them resume their star-ness, or crocodile-ness, or mermaid-ness, or Woody-From-Toy-Story-ness on the table, once the wearer has removed them. So we did that for a while, and then we, as in we our household, went home. They, I hope, went to Mass.

We came home and lay around for a while -- the Eucharistic Procession around the parking lot was a hot and sticky business -- and then the children and I went back again for the parish festival this afternoon. This also took place around the parking lot, and was also hot and sticky, not only with heat and humidity but with disco music (when was the last time you heard "Car Wash?" I ask you) and watermelon and big cups of horchata and canteloupe juice, which unlike your standard-issue koolaid seemed mostly to get drunk rather than spilt, even by small children.

They had bicycle races, involving small and mostly unbelievably girly bikes:  first the kids raced, and then the dads. They had several rounds of tug-o'-war:  first boys vs. girls, then boys vs. boys, and then the dads. They had sack races and egg-and-spoon races:  and then the dads. Do you see a pattern emerging here? Go on, ask me who had the most fun at this festival. When we left, the bouncy castle was still standing, and so were most of the dads . . .

Father got nailed with water balloons. Later, the perpetrators were lined up against one of the tents and shot. Adding "with water balloons" seems a wimpy rhetorical move, but in this touchy day and age, one cannot ever assume anything. Anyway, when we left, people were still dumping plastic wastebaskets full of water on each other:  not only the dads, not only the teenaged boys, but also several heretofore upright-looking ladies of the Spanish community, who seemed miraculously able to soak other people without getting a drop on their own immaculate outfits.

I sat under the Faith Formation tent with Miss Margaret Mary, the head catechist, and sold children's Bibles. The indefatigable Faith Formation program, by which I really mean that Miss Margaret Mary is indefatigable, and she is the Faith Formation program, is sponsoring a Bible-reading club this summer.  Parents are encouraged to buy one of these very nice picture Bibles at a significant discount, and to read Bible stories with their children daily. With each purchase of a Bible, each child in the household receives a pocket folder with reading-log forms, which may be redeemed weekly for little prizes. It is Miss Margaret Mary's hope, and mine, that the children of the Saint Dymphna's Faith Formation program will go forth into the world not believing that our first parents were named Odd and Even.

So now we're home, and it's dinner time, but we're all hot and sticky and full of horchata and watermelon and candy out of the pinata, and eating seems like too much trouble, never mind cooking. It's been an embodied kind of day from start to finish, which seems right. That's what He gives us, after all, over and over:  not an essence, not a memory, not -- as Father said this morning -- some kind of spiritual tea party, but His very physicality present in the Eucharist, the divine humanity which opened the Scriptures to astonished listeners, and then went to the party.