Song at the Year's Turning: Seven Quick Takes

1

The title of this post is also the title of a poem by R.S. Thomas. Rest assured, he did not steal it from me.

The day began with the noise of gunfire. Every New Year's Eve in the morning, people -- and I don't know who they are, just local folks -- get together to shoot black-powder muskets. The intervening year gives us just enough time to forget about this tradition, so that every December 31, we are surprised anew. 

2

Though the year is turning, the season has not, yet. It's still Christmas:  the seventh day, a kind of mid-season Sabbath, especially if you consider that the six geese of yesterday are meant to suggest the six days during which God worked at the business of Creation. Today, the seven swans a-swimming stand for the seven sacraments, the gifts of grace.

Anyway, the way the liturgical year drapes itself over the edge of the calendar year makes me think of an enjambment in poetry. The line breaks, but the syntax overrides the interruption.

3

Which of course means we still get to listen to Christmas music.

4

This new year is the year in which, God willing, the first of my children will leave home.  She turns seventeen next week, which is suddenly seeming like an awfully young age to venture forth into the world, though it's how old I was when I went to college, and we've about come to the end of the line of possibilities here at home. 

Today she's been upstairs banging out scholarship essays and finishing applications with redheaded vigor, and who can blame her? The whole process is a little like planning some open-ended road trip, where you know you want to wind up at Firehole Canyon in Wyoming by two weeks from Tuesday, but between here and there, who knows;  and after that, between the campground and the Pacific Ocean, anything could happen. The fact that the adventure, right now, exists purely in the imagination is what drives the show. You want to get it down on paper, so to speak, even knowing -- or because you know -- that you have no clue how it's all supposed to turn out. 

5

Several months ago, Amy Welborn asked where all the menopausebloggers were. And I replied to the world in general that 

there's not much to write about what's not happening. Or, you do see them, but you see them being those homeschooling mommy-types, because that's what they were doing when they became hormonal changelings, and being a changeling means only that you change. Everything else stays the same. The only difference is that now you're not pregnant, birthing, or lactating any more (even at the height of my fertile glory, I never crafted), and you're maybe a little more taken up with weight-loss, because after all, there is something to say about some things that don't happen.

Of course it's not true that everything else stays the same. If it were, then nobody would be leaving home, and nobody else would be weeping in my room at the prospect and then going off to console herself by trying to play Epiphany's old 1/4-size violin, with a resultant noise like rutting dragonflies -- or at least, the noise you imagine that rutting dragonflies would make if they wore clip-on microphones like Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain -- which, let me tell you, is at least as disturbing as the sound of black-powder muskets going off all over town.

This long, odd thought occurred to me just now.  Seventeen years ago today, I was waiting for a child to emerge into the light. I was beyond waiting -- she'd been supposed to arrive on Boxing Day, but by New Year's Eve still had given no indication of ever meaning to leave her dark and comfortable place of residence. Though I myself was very uncomfortable at that point and heartily sick of being pregnant, at the same time I remember being pierced by a strange pre-emptive nostalgia. I wanted to see the baby;  I wanted her to emerge and live her life;  at the same time, I found myself clinging just the tiniest bit to the loveliness of waiting, unknowing, bearing that unseen child closer to my heart than, physically speaking, she would ever be again.

It was a little like not wanting Advent to end, at least not before all its import has really sunk in. Here on the far side of Christmas Day, the whole year gathering itself to jump the cliff, that previous sentence actually sounds sane to me. Wait, wait, come back! Let's do it again! I'll pay attention this time, I swear! 

Well, as we all know, time does not backwater. What strikes me now, though, is that although I'm past having babies, what I'm waiting for now is the birth of my first adult. It's like a pregnancy, but also like midwifery. And it is a generativity which, though screamingly obvious I guess, has taken me pleasantly by surprise.

6

Ah. The dragonflies have taken up singing.

7

Meanwhile, because heretofore John Denver has been woefully underrepresented on this blog . . .

Merry Christmas AND Happy New Year. 

To Jen, and to all y'all, too.

Poetry Friday: Two Cold Morning Poems at the Turn of the Year

Because it's still Christmas:

Christmas Day in the Morning

My lady takes the pins from her hair,

Lets the heavy plaits fall. The sweaty nurse,

Half-asleep in the corner, hides her face

From a white streak of sunlight on the floor.

As it should, the day breaks clear

And hard. The basin-water's turned to ice.

In the courtyard, a clamor of geese,

Dogs quarreling underfoot, and everywhere

The blind cold, the dumbstruck wind.

In the crib, the staring child. My lady goes

On working the hard comb through her hair.

Bells crack apart the brittle air,

Shake the walls, shake the saints, their flat haloes,

The painted Christ, cold lilies in His hand.

(grateful acknowledgment to the editors of First Things, where this poem first appeared in print)


And for tomorrow:

New Year's Day

We woke late, to a brittle, ice-gray light.

Between us the baby stirred, fluttered an eye,

Slept on. Clouds passed the window:  dim, then bright.

In the street outside, a girl cried, Michael, I

Hate you, hate you. For Christ's sake, turn around.

 Heels ticked past. There was no other sound.

Here we are, I said. Another year

Gone. You said, Another year begun.

We kissed, parted. Over us hung a clear

Silence, transitory as the sun.

Read the rest of this week's Poetry Friday offerings here.  

PS:  Janet notes that the first poem makes a kind of counterpoint to Carl Sandburg's "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind,"  which I confess that I'd forgotten all about and didn't have in my mind when I wrote the poem, so the crossover is kind of uncanny. I actually started that poem in the student union at the University of Utah, listening to Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances" on the piped-in radio. That's what happens when I try to write an  "Ancient Air and Dance"  -- cold air.

On the Sixth Day of Christmas

The six geese a-laying, I am told, stand for the six days of Creation, before God rested. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in my room, in a rocking chair by the open door, listening to a conversation upstairs in which Crispina is trying to work out the family tree of the little doll she bought yesterday with her very own money, a plastic infant infused with the scent of roses. This is a little bizarre, I think, but the doll does smell nice.

Crispina to Helier:  . . . and Epiphany's husband will be Uncle Somebody, and you're Uncle Helier . . .

Helier to Crispina:  I'm trying to read.

Nothing like babies to turn a young man to the improvement of his mind by much reading. Unless it's area rugs. In my experience, area rugs raise all kinds of theological questions crying out to be answered by serious research in a library far, far away.

I'm only halfway through my first cup of coffee, and still on vacation -- the Octave of Christmas is a long, long seventh day -- so if you were expecting coherence, you might wish to seek it elsewhere.

Anyway.

We went to Wal-Mart yesterday, because in this town you cain't hardly not go to Wal-Mart. It's what you do when you want to get out of the house. The Main Street businesses stay closed -- on Monday, at least, a beautiful stillness reigned on the courthouse square, and I think the Good Neighbor Shop is shut all week -- but at Wal-Mart there is no Octave, no season at all other than a market awareness of  shifts in demand, and anyway, the kids got gift cards for Christmas which they were burning to use.

Crispina couldn't find her gift card so had to raid her piggy bank, which contained, rather to my surprise, nine dollars and forty cents. The gift card was for ten dollars, so she didn't come out too badly. I suggested, in fact, that she might take less than nine dollars and forty cents with her to the store, so that this Cash in Search of Something to Be Spent On impulse didn't burn up everything she had, but nothing doing. She loaded all her money into one of those little plastic-net bags that chocolate coins come in, and off we went.

Shopping with children requires an enormity of patience and discretion, neither of which I naturally have in spades. When Epiphany and Amicus were little and we lived in England, I used to take them down the road to a magical shop run by a German lady, full of every kind of exquisite natural-wood Waldorfy toy imaginable. Many of the toys were insanely expensive, but there was always something -- a little  boat powered by a balloon, for instance -- that a child could buy with the random coins jangling in his or her pocket, and while it was cheap and maybe didn't last terribly long, it was never quite junk. It was wonderful to walk into this shop;  it was even not quite torture to spend two hours in this shop with a child who had to finger everything over forty-seven times and be told, "No, that costs ninety-two pounds, and you have three pounds thirty-eight pence."

The lady, behind her counter, was kind and helpful, occasionally pointing out shelves of things within the child's price range. She was also beautiful, sort of agelessly middle-aged as I (ahem) am now, I'm sure, with masses of golden curls and a look of serenity which I think must have come in the box with all the Waldorf stuff. Her shop occupied the same block as a vegetarian grocery with naturopathic clinics upstairs where you could go to have an aromatherapy massage or be adjusted by an osteopath. Anyway, she fit right in. We liked to go and visit her, and as I say, the shop itself was like something out of a fairy tale. You walked around long enough, and eventually some enchanted shelf would proffer you exactly what you wanted.

Not . . . so . . . Wal-Mart. Do I even need to say that? Anyway, there we were. The older kids went off to wander, as they told me, while Crispina and I walked up and down the aisles, up and down the aisles, past baby dolls which laughed at us or mimicked crawling or, when punched in the stomach, sneezed and said they were stuffy, Mommy. All of them cost more than nine dollars and forty cents, for which I am still thankful. I dislike toys that do things for you, especially when the things are noisy and repetitive;  on the other hand, it wasn't my money. I was there in merely an advisory capacity.

We looked at ugly computer-generated-looking animal toys. Cheap, but nah. We walked down the Barbie aisle. There was a whole shelf of five-dollar Barbies, fortunately high enough up that Crispina's eye wouldn't naturally have fallen on them. I don't loathe Barbie any more than I loathe sneezing baby dolls, and in fact the Barbies we do have have survived many years of rough living and been named things like Joseph and wrapped in toilet paper to be mummies -- the dead Egyptian kind, not the fancy-pink-carriage-pushing kind. In my experience, little girls notice Barbie's unnatural proportions far less than grown women do. In fact, they don't seem to think about them at all, which is why we've had Barbies play Saint Therese, for example. So I am not particularly anti-Barbie, but still. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy her, either.

Around and around we went:  Barbie, aaa-choo, hahaha, crawlcrawlcrawl. "How much is she? How much is she? How much is this? How much money do I have again?" Around and around and around.

I was on the verge of suggesting that we give up, that we save her money for another day, that simply having it didn't mean she had to spend it right then, that the right thing would come along in its time . . . when both of us, at once, saw this little baby doll by herself. I don't know where she came from;  we hadn't seen her in all our previous rounds of that aisle. There didn't seem to be any more like her. She was small, to be sure, but pretty enough that I really didn't think she'd cost less than ten dollars. We took her over to the scanner and swiped her bar code. Beeeeep. Five dollars. Sold, with money left over.

So, here she is, our plastic relative, scented with imitation attar-of-roses, in the bosom of our family, surrounded by Uncle Helier and the suggestion of Uncle Somebody-We-Probably-Haven't-Met-Yet. I'm not going to make too much of this, because experience tells me that this doll has roughly three days of primacy left. Maybe. She's had a bed made for her, been assigned a dresser, been clad in some other doll's rompers (all she was wearing to begin with was a diaper and hooded towel, not exactly warm in the frigid winter), named several times over, carried around in a makeshift sling fashioned from my old polarfleece scarf . . . and I've seen this happen to enough dolls already to know it won't last.

Ah, in fact, there's now a little drama being enacted upstairs, wherein one child wants very much to be in the room of another who does not require her company at this time, and has -- the first child, that is --  responded to my suggestion that she play with her baby doll by retorting, "I don't like baby dolls."

Such, as they say, is life. Make of it what you will, while I get dressed for Mass.


P.S. Though there are toys I like more than others, and toys I really don't like,  I've never been one to ban a kind of toy outright, or to tell other people that we don't allow x or y or z. And I can point to the exact reason why I don't do that. Years ago I was friends with a woman who had had six sons, most of whom were grown up already. She also had, at last, a little granddaughter. Once when she went to visit, she took the little granddaughter a doll -- all those years of boys, and finally, finally, she was able to buy a doll. You can imagine the time she spent.

So she arrived with this doll at her son's house, to be told, "Oh, we don't do gender-specific toys. Stuffed animals are fine, but we don't let her have dolls."

"I went out," my friend told me later, "and walked around the lake and cried."

In short, in my view, there are very, very, very few principles worth quite that much, especially when it's someone else's privilege to do the giving. Maybe this is a non-sequitur, but then again, maybe it's not.

PPS:  One of the most fun things the kids got for Christmas, by the way, among many, many fun things, was a very noisy game. Reality trumps most things, I find . . . 

Another Kind of Golden Ring

. . . -ing, that is.

Burwell is part of the great, flat, flood-prone fenland of East Anglia, my favorite part of England, all huge sky and rivers. These are actually funeral bells, but/and they are so beautifully clear on the cold open air.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas

I didn't think, until too late, of having donuts for breakfast.

Which sort of sums up my current approach to celebrating the liturgical year, I'm afraid.

On the other hand, I can always post carols. Here's my favorite arrangement of "In the Bleak Midwinter," by one of my favorite choirs in Cambridge. Kings gets all the glammy exposure, but one of the loveliest Lessons and Carols I ever heard was at Trinity.

Enjoy:

On the Fourth Day of Christmas . . .

. . . (also the Feast of the Holy Innocents), I used Jen's Saint's Name Generator to choose a patron saint for 2011.

And I was given . . . .


Saint Joseph. 

Patronage:  against doubt and hesitation;  carpenters;  civil engineers;  dying people; expectant mothers;  families;  fathers;  happy death;  holy death;  house hunters;  immigrants;  laborers;  married people;  travelers;  unborn children;  working people. 

Feast days: March 19, May 1 (Saint Joseph the Worker)

Okay, well, I'm not expectant, house-hunting (thank heavens), or a civil engineer. But I am a doubter and a hesitant person. At the same time, I'm  a person whose awareness that life points towards the making of a happy and holy death increases with the passing of the years.

And it seems only right that a patron chosen today would be protector of the unborn and of families, especially families who need a home, and work to support them.

So in the coming year, I'll make my petition:   
 Saint Joseph, pray for us. 

Irrelevant P.S.:   And then there's this.

On the Third Day of Christmas

My true love gave me . . . this.

On the Feast of the Holy Family

I think I posted this last year, but it's lovely enough for a reprise.

Snow Is Falling, Snow on Snow

It began this morning before Mass ended. On my way out of the church I found my friend's five-year-old son -- my youngest Greek student, he distinguishes himself by endeavoring to write the names of the Greek letters in Greek letters --standing with his face pressed to the glass door in an attitude of glowering meditation. Outside, the first flakes were swirling down out of a number-two-pencil-lead sky.

"Hey, Sean," I remarked. "Merry Christmas."

"Mm," he said, continuing to stare out at the snow. He wasn't really glowering, of course, but merely thinking hard, or being happy in the way some children are happy, by being still and not wanting to be spoken to. So I left him there, waiting for the rest of his family to catch up with him, and went home.

All day long the Feast of the Incarnation has celebrated itself by enfleshing the naked trees in transient white. The whole world looks felted. At dinner, as night fell, we sat in the candlelight watching the snow fall and fall and fall outside the big windows, the holly and laurel leaves grow thicker and thicker.

It was not like this at Bethlehem, whatever the carols say. Still, this is the image imprinted on us by Christina Rossetti:  the iron earth, the moan of the wind, the child born into a world which has nothing to give Him, because He owns everything -- except, of course, the human heart, until it is offered to Him. And the world has nothing to give Him, because it is not,  generally speaking,  a giving world. Into the cold heart of creation astray He came, a little light, the source of all light.

We know that we don't know the day of His coming again. For that matter, we know that we don't know the day and hour of His first coming;  we call it today, because we have to feast Him sometime. Every child has a birthday, whether anyone remembers it or not, and every child's birth is a mystery worth commemorating. I think on the births of my own children, most of which took place in the small hours of the night, and how when all the hard work was over, and I was made comfortable in a clean bed in a quiet room, holding the new baby I would gaze at that face, hidden to me for so many months and now made known, a face like no other in all the world. Not a birthday passes when I don't look back on that moment when that person whom I love was made known to me.

Every child's face is just that:  the revelation of something new and unlike anything which has gone before it, though on the other hand, it is like every other face in its humanity. And though it is lovely for a child to have a mother who wants to hold him and think about these things, they are not made untrue by her turning her back on him. Even if no one loves him enough to mark the day of his coming into the world, still he has come. And if he is taken into a family of goodhearted people, they will make a day for him, because this is at least the beginning of love:  to say, "It matters that you were born."

All this snow-on-snow business -- would I even have that phrase at my disposal if this were a day like any other day? Because the Church chose this day, even the weather is sanctified. It means something. If, as has happened some years, it's sixty degrees out, and the children wear t-shirts, the day is warm with the mildness of God. If, as is happening now, it's snowing so hard that the lights flicker on and off, and the cold creeps in under the doors, the night is cold with the despair of the world, and the candle on the table shines the more brightly.

Sweet Joy

Poetry Friday: Christmas Eve Edition

Not me this time.

A Christmas Carol

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O Weary, Weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the Kings,
But here the true hearts are.) 

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O Weary, Weary is the world,
But here the heart's desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

G.K. Chesterton

Merry Christmas, y'all!

(and visit A Year of Reading for the rest of Poetry Friday)

Christmas Dinner Menu

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, no one else awake yet, making out a shopping list and feeling -- well, I never feel organized, but as if I perhaps were starting to have a clue.

Here's what we're having for Christmas dinner:

turkey (a 26-pound monster, because we want leftovers to tide us over for some days)
cornbread dressing
homemade cranberry-orange sauce
braised brussels sprouts
sweet potatoes, and/or roasted carrots and parsnips
this very simple oyster pie, because we always had oyster pie at Christmas in my family

for dessert:

Epiphany's Christmas pudding
cherry pie
assorted homemade cookies
homemade eggnog, minus the brandy or rum


The last Ebay package has arrived. Now if we can all just not get sick in the next twenty-four hours . . .

A Few Good Things for the Middle of the Week

Still housecleaning:  my mother arrives tonight. So I'll leave you with a little read-around of things I'm glad other people are thinking and saying:


Jennifer Fulwiler at Conversion Diary writes:

When you’ve only ever seen a spiritual ritual as practiced by a devout few, it’s easy to stand in awe — you’re seeing it in its purest form. When you’ve never seen it as lived by the masses, exposed to all the bad things that come with human frailty, it’s easy to imagine that this faith contains a power strong enough to trump even human free will, that all who practice it automatically become devout and saintly. (Willful Awe )

 Here's Betty Duffy on being transformed:

Maybe it’s not an exact metaphor, but my response to the more gentle irritation of the Holy Spirit is the same. I have a feeling that what I’m doing is not good for me or my family, a sense of division when for instance, I mindlessly check my stats on this blog: “Show me Denmark! Show me California! Come on Stat counter, Feed me.” The thrill of watching my audience show up in real time is the validation that every writer seeks, and that the internet uniquely makes possible. But it interferes with what I initially set out to do here, which is write because it is what I love and feel called to do. I have knowledge that I have lost my bearings, but I silence it, “Be quiet and let me have my fun.”

And thus my continued transformation into the person Christ wants me to be is postponed, for another day, because I’m having my time. There are so many ways in which I do not want to be transformed, so many ways in which I’d like to continue garumphing along this path of mediocrity. 

Meanwhile, Pentimento writes about Christmas and a New Yorker's burden of homesickness:

But missing all of these things is really missing another life, a life that I no longer live.  In some ways, it's much better that that life has now been put away.  It's not the difficulty of that life, its sadness, its loneliness, that I miss, but the shreds of color, of light, and of sound that it bore, and I miss the companions of yore, some of whom I will never see again.  There is so little of the beauty that I miss, and so little of consolation, here.  I pray every day that God will allow me and my family to plant seeds, where we live now, that will bear fruit -- seeds of beauty in a place that is starved for it -- and that, perhaps, my consolation will come in this way.

Maclin Horton on how the melancholic waits for joy:

The joy of the melancholic is always in the shadow of his knowledge that it can never be complete or permanent. “I don’t trust happiness. I never did; I never will,” says the country singer Mac Sledge in that wonderful movie Tender Mercies. And who would be so foolish as to tell him he should? Even a life miraculously fortunate and untroubled will come to an end. A young man wins the heart of the beautiful woman for whom he yearns, and promises to love her forever. But even if they live long and happily together, the end will come. They will lose the glow of youth and fade together, growing weak and wrinkled and slow. And no matter how much grace and devotion they bring to those years, time is bearing down on them, and will bring his scythe down to separate them.

At I Have to Sit Down, Simcha Fisher muses on the reality that no virtue is petty:

Prudence, like temperance, is such a dreary virtue.   Justice and fortitude are about getting stuff done — but prudence and temperance are all about holding back, clamping down, cutting back, saying no. It’s all about the negative: wait, stop, think, don’t do it, hold your horses, cut it out.

Or . . . not.   In this season of our life, it seems that another baby is a joy to be postponed for a while yet.  With growing astonishment, I’m discovering that there is no tension between prudence and generosity.  Prudence is a kind of generosity. Of course it is!  Everything that comes from God overflows.  What is the promised land?  Not a static place, a spot on the map, but a state of motion, of spilling over — a land flowing with milk and honey.  And if virtuous behavior imitates God, then how could some virtues be more petty than others?

Amy Welborn: 

Prepare to respond to grace when it comes  because grace is God’s life and it’s all that stands between you sitting in a closed-off room gazing at a mirror and you out there on the other side of the door the window where it’s light.  Prepare for that grace  because it does come, and in small ways.  An invitation to say yes here and a challenge to say no there.  Every day. All the time. But you have to prepare for it because it all happens so fast and seems so common but really is not.  It’s like a baby born in a small town no one ever heard of. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day,after all. If you don’t prepare, you just might – no, you probably will – miss it.

I am thinking that the longer I sit here staring at a screen, the more likely I am to miss whatever grace might get kicked into my life today -- because to catch it, I really need to get up and live my life. So that's what I'm going to do. Later, y'all.

The Last Tuesday in Advent

The whole house smells of cider vinegar. I began the day by spraying it into my hair in the bath, for a conditioner, then spraying it into the empty bathtub before plying the scrub brush, and onto the bathroom counter and into the sink and onto the floor. By the time I was finished, I was not so clean, but the bathroom was sparkling and very tart.

I've been washing walls -- a hopeless venture, because everything is painted in flat paint, often over wallpaper, so the handprints don't come off, but sections of the whole surface occasionally do. Washing woodwork is a fractionally more satisfying endeavor, because at least the door or the baseboard does look cleaner when I'm done. And again, it smells . . . not really of apple juice, and not really of salad dressing, but of some hybrid of the two.

And then my throat hurts, which just figures, after choir practice went so well last night. To ward off whatever ugliness might be brewing there, I've been spritzing cider vinegar onto my tonsils, too, wincing at the taste. Apple-juice-salad-dressing hybrid really isn't my beverage of choice, but if it keeps me some ghost of a voice, just long enough to make it through "The Truth From Above" on Friday night, I'll gargle it by the gallon.

Speaking of truth from above, I am taking it on faith that a lunar eclipse really did occur last night. What occurred here was cloud cover. Aelred woke up around 2:30 a.m. and strolled out for a look, but nothing doing except low white sky like a textured ceiling. We had promised to wake the children to see the eclipse;  rousing the whole household in the small hours to gawk at ordinary clouds seemed not the better part of wisdom, so we didn't, although I did shake Helier and, when his eyes opened a crack, proceed to tell him that I was waking him as promised, but that there was nothing to see. This did little to mitigate his outrage at eight this morning, when he realized he'd missed the show, even though in these parts there'd been no show to miss. At least his anger tends to be fleeting.

Amicus spent yesterday, from 7:45 onwards unto sundown, hauling boxes of frozen turkeys and other similarly heavy holiday food to the automobiles of clients of our county's Christian Mission, for which effort he and his friends were called "white m.f.," without benefit of abbreviation, by some grateful recipients of their labors. It's moments like those, as he observed later, which make a person grateful for a little Catholic theology, which gives you something to do with such experiences other than get mad and say to yourself that next year you're staying home. To wit:  you can "offer it bloodywell up for the holy souls," as a character in Muriel Spark's Memento Mori -- a person with more than a little cider vinegar in her voice -- so tartly puts it. For that matter, you can offer it up for the person who is calling you names because obviously, in their universe, it's your fault that the bottom of the box you were holding gave way beneath the weight of the turkey, so that it and  several cans of cranberry sauce landed on your nasty leprous foot, and you probably did it on purpose as a sort of starter hate-crime;  and who, inhabiting that bleak angry walled-in universe, needs your quiet sacrifice at least as much as the holy souls do, and probably more than he needs the food.

As Amicus also observed, however, though the name-calling rankled long after the day was over despite all the offering-up, the name-callers comprised a minority of the people served. Many food-box recipients,  actually, once their own groceries were stowed in their cars, came back to help push wheelbarrows to other people's cars, perhaps recognizing that poverty is no absolute barrier to generosity, or to the dignity of helping another person. In short, they were good people, and Amicus and his friends worked side by side with them, all day long in the cold and the pallid sunshine, until the food was gone and the last car had pulled away laden.

Now Aelred is trying to sort out a rather perplexing Boy Scout popcorn order form -- or to put it another way, what's perplexing is that the selection of popcorn currently in residence in our dining room does not absolutely correspond to what's listed on the form, and nobody seems to remember who paid what to whom. I am in the bedroom, my feet on a pile of clean laundry, hiding from all that.

Mary: Creation, Incarnation, Revelation, and More

 Or;  really, why we make such a big deal.



Swiped from The Anchoress.

Homeschooling: Fall Semester Progress Report

Our school term ended Friday, and here's where we are:

1. Crispina, first grade.

A. Reading and Writing

It's coming along nicely. Halfway through Level 3 of the Little Stories for Little Folks program, she's reading fairly fluently, though not yet easily enough that she really wants to pick up a book and read to herself. We practice reading in as many different contexts as we can:  math story problems, poems for copywork, recipes, labels, etc., and her confidence grows daily. Good news there. 

Writing, on the other hand, is something she actively enjoys and does a lot of. We have done a huge amount of copywork this fall, in addition to handwriting exercises in her CHC book:  typically a 4-line poem stanza per day. Gradually the copywork seems to be helping her to spell words in a little more orthodox way (she's never let spelling get in the way of what she wanted to write), and to slow down and read words more carefully and thoroughly, so that it's reinforcing her reading skills as well.

We have also worked on sentence-writing and making up short stories in our journals, and we have memorized poems for recitation. 

B. Math

Like her older sister before her, this child seems to regard math as an impenetrable foreign language. Therefore I'm trying to give her what her older sister did not get in school at this age, namely:  an opportunity to memorize basic facts. I think she's simply going to have to memorize, because she doesn't yet see any logic in the way numbers work. We've worked hard at the concept of addition and subtraction as reverse operations in the past few weeks, doing addition problems and then writing the corresponding subtraction problem (e.g., 3+2=5/2=5-3), but in doing the reverse operation, she still tends to plug numbers in arbitrarily (5=2-3). Work with number lines helps a lot. I've also recently had her do practice sets of +1, +2, +3 problems, working on the idea that adding three just means adding one, then one more, then one more, and trying to get her to see that in her mind.

Her curriculum has multiplication up next, but I really think we need to solidify addition and subtraction before we begin looking at shortcuts. It's my hope that moving slowly now to make certain that these things become second nature will pay off later.

We've also worked on money and measurements and played with concepts like fractals and angles. And we've been working our way through the "Kitten"-level story problems at MathCats.com. Miquon, our primary curriculum right now, doesn't introduce word problems until late in the game, but she enjoys these, and Helier, who does have a high level of math confidence, enjoys helping her work them, which gives him a chance both to shine, to lead by example, and to review basic facts for his own benefit. (one good reason to school different levels together when you can!)

C. History (with Helier)

We spent most of the semester on ancient Egypt, which has been no end of fascinating. Using Elizabeth Payne's Landmark Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt, plus a variety of Usborne books, we've become familiar with many eccentric personalities of the ancient world. What sticks in Crispina's mind:  Hatshepsut and her pink sphinxes.

D. Science (with Helier)

We've worked on themes related to the natural world:  animals of North America (a conversation about rabies made her afraid to go outside for several days, because "there's rabies out there"), solar system, seasons, weather, and plants. Currently we're growing beans on the kitchen windowsill and, every several days, drawing their progress in our journals.

E. Greek (with Helier)

Both Helier and Crispina have participated in an elementary-level Greek class I taught this semester, using Karen Mohs's Hey, Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek! This semester, we've concentrated on learning to read, write, and say the sounds of the Greek alphabet. Next semester we'll continue to review the alphabet while adding vocabulary words. We've also been reading a little book of stories about an early-20th-century Greek boy named Christophilos, living near Mt. Athos.

F. Read-Aloud Literature (with Helier)

We've read a variety of books this fall:  all but the last of the Chronicles of Narnia;  Arthur Ransome's Missee Lee, from the Swallows and Amazons series; Little House in the Big Woods; Outlaws of Ravenhurst;  and more titles I can't remember right now!

G. Field Trips and Extracurricular Activities

It's been largely a "home" year, but we have visited both the Schiele Museum of Natural History in Gastonia and the Catawba Science Center in Hickory at least once each this term. Crispina also participated in our parish's scouting program for girls.

2. Helier, second grade.

A. Reading and Writing

Helier's reading has taken off. The switch has flipped. The boy who a few months ago politely declined to read to himself now routinely spends an entire afternoon curled up with a book. He inhaled the first three Harry Potter books in about three days, though I've made him stop for now, because he found them scary. Since then, Amicus has helpfully introduced him to the Redwall series, of which there are many, many books, so hopefully it'll be a while before we have to hook him onto something else.

Because his test scores last spring were -- erratic, shall we say, or perhaps revelatory -- not bad, just more indicative of what he didn't feel like thinking about right then than of what his actual abilities are -- I have worked with him specifically on reading comprehension, upping my demands for narration, particularly of assigned rather than chosen pleasure reading. The Little Folks series from CHC at this level includes helpful questions at the end of each story, including vocabulary challenges as well as "understanding" questions. Surprise, surprise, he does understand what he reads. And in speaking, he uses a wide, advanced (according to the teacher next door) vocabulary with ease, so it's obvious that he's internalizing the structures and ranges of meanings in his native language.

His handwriting has also improved dramatically since the beginning of the year. All my children, with the exception of Crispina, have struggled with handwriting -- we seem not to be a fine-motor-skill kind of family, at least in the early-elementary years. I have used CHC's handwriting series plus an increasingly heavy load of copywork to give him practice in letter formation, and it is a pleasure to see writing, as a mechanical activity, coming more easily and naturally to him. Like Crispina, he is internalizing a sense of good written English as he copies, as well as learning correct spelling.

In addition to copywork, I have also used journals for sentence-writing and other grammar-related exercises, as well as for short original written compositions, and we have memorized poems for recitation, which Helier does with gusto.

B. Math

Helier exhibits a high level of math confidence and ability. He is working in the MCP Math Level C, listed for third grade in the CHC curriculum, and though we have taken some things slowly, he has breezed through most lessons with very little trouble. Easy for him:  all addition, including multi-digit addition with regrouping (two addends:  column addition with three or more addends is harder and will need review), basic money skills (making change is also harder;  the book introduced this before lessons on rounding and estimating, which made the making-change exercises more difficult), place-value recognition, rounding to the nearest ten or hundred. As long as he stays focused (also a challenge), he can tackle any problem the book presents him. Occasionally he will miss a problem due to a careless error in addition, and I am working with him to help certain facts come more quickly (for instance, it's hard to remember that 8+7=15, but if you remember that 7+7=14, that helps).

I'm thinking of adding an abacus to our arsenal of math manipulatives . . .

C. History. See Crispina's report, above. The only difference is that what sticks with Helier are the battles, as in the Battle of Megiddo.

D. Science. Also see Crispina's report.

E. Greek. As above.

F. Read-aloud Literature. As above.

G. Extracurriculars

Helier is a Wolf this year in his Cub Scout pack. Both H and C will begin piano lessons in January.

3. Amicus, seventh grade

A. English

Amicus has been working his way through a book of grammar and composition exercises, studying the short story and mythology in literature, and doing a huge amount of reading and writing "across the curriculum," as they say. I have seriously pushed composition this year, and he has produced a 3-5-page researched paper weekly all semester. He has just finished reading Beowulf as an independent-reading project.

B. Math

His text this year is Saxon's Algebra 1/2, and we use a set of instructional DVDs created to accompany this text as an additional resource, which he has found very helpful. At this point, he has worked through Lesson 50, scoring no less than 90% on any problem set or test. He works hard at math, but performs consistently well without seeming to sweat all that much.

C. Science

Amicus is using Michael Spear's All Creatures Great and Small life science text, which in itself is not that exciting a book -- Epiphany disliked it. Amicus, on the other hand, has discovered a great interest in biology and has worked avidly at every chapter in this book. Again, he is maintaining an A average and largely enjoying the work. He anticipates pursuing as many science and math courses as he can in high school, so we are using seventh and eighth grades to lay a strong foundation for that pursuit.

D. History

Amicus has been working his way through a year-long world-history research project, in which he chooses a topic each week, in chronological order from ancient history through, eventually, the contemporary world. He has written papers on the Persian Empire, Roman military tactics, the exploits of the Ostrogoths, among other subjects. He has also read historical fiction and, on his own, a number of military-history titles by Stephen Ambrose, of Band of Brothers fame. Other than a tendency not to print out and hand in his work as he finishes it, he has performed admirably in yet another subject of great interest to him.

E. Art History

Every quarter Amicus has a choice of artists from a given period, from which he chooses one as the subject for a short research paper. So far he has written on Fra Angelico and Michelangelo.

F. Language:  Greek

Amicus and Epiphany are both taking a New-Testament Greek class taught by our parish priest. He's the one doing the grading;  they both say it's hard, and they like Latin better.

G. Extracurricular Activities

Amicus is a Boy Scout, First Class. With his troop he has done a great deal of hiking and camping, plus a number of service projects (this coming Monday he will go at 7:45 to the county's Christian Ministries food handout, to spend the day delivering wheelbarrows full of holiday food to clients' cars). He is also a regular altar server in our parish, and today he ran his first 5K road race.

4. Epiphany, twelfth grade

OK, Epiphany just received her first college acceptance letter today, so it's all good. I could just stop there.

But I won't.

A. Humanities

We have done a four-year course in which reading for both history and literature has been dovetailed as a humanities class. This year has been a summing-up year, in which Epiphany has read Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization as a core text, and accompanied it with primary sources and literature from each period the text covers:  excerpts from Dante, several Shakespeare plays including King Lear, a selection of Romantic poets, etc. She has written five five-paragraph essays, plus a number of shorter papers for this course, and we have worked hard at refining her expository-writing skills by targeting problem areas in each paper. This, I think, has been her favorite class, and she has worked incredibly hard to master a heavy reading and writing load (trying to prepare her for success in college here).

She has also read several major novels, including Middlemarch and Manzoni's The Betrothed, and has watched productions of Shakespeare plays on video (Twelfth Night, Lear).

In the spring she will write a senior thesis on a research topic drawn from her reading this term. 

B. English

In addition to her humanities coursework, Epiphany has also been working her way through Jensen's Grammar and Jensen's Format Writing. In addition to academic papers, she has also written a variety of types of letter and a resume (both of which exercises have come in handy in the college-application process, I might add).

C. Math

As I noted above, Epiphany is a student who regards math as a foreign language. Still, to her credit, she has worked very hard to keep her head above water in a subject which does not come at all easily to her. Using the Teaching Textbooks Algebra II course, she has maintained a C average, which frankly at this late date we will take, thank you very much. Geometry was all right, but algebra has always been largely opaque to her, so passing is good . . .

D. Chemistry

Epiphany has finished Module 6 in the Apologia Exploring Creation with Chemistry program. This last module took her much longer than she had anticipated, but she has managed to do all the problems correctly and perform the experiments. Like math, science is not a subject which comes naturally to her as an interest, but her tenacity in mastering the material on her own is admirable, and she has managed to maintain an A average.

E. Language:  Greek. See the entry for Amicus, above. Epiphany likes to translate Latin passages on her own, to keep her hand in.

F. Moral Theology, using the Didache series and writing a paper. Maintained an A average.  This was a 1-semester course which will be replaced in the spring by Economics and U.S. Government.

G. Electives and Extracurriculars

1. Violin and youth orchestra
2. Home economics, including cooking, baking, sewing, knitting, ironing, home maintenance, etc.
3. Teaching experience:  E is an assistant catechist in the third-grade Faith Formation class at church
4. Currently working on organizing a discernment group for young women at church

I think that sums us up. We've had a very productive semester all around, and I'm proud of all my children for the things they have accomplished (and of course I love them for themselves). Now it's good to be finished for a time -- on to baking, decorating, gift-wrapping, and the general freneticness of the week before Christmas.

This Just In

Or, well, she's just in. Epiphany. To the first of the colleges on her list and, incidentally, her current first choice, though there's another strong contender whose campus we need to see with students before we make up our minds for sure.

A happy early Christmas present, and a weight off the mind of a nervous homeschooling mother. Yeah, they really do go to college. I always believed it, but it sure is nice to know.

O Sapientia

The first of the Great O Antiphons:

Seven Quick Takes: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Boxes on the Porch

It didn't snow this week after all, but when I went out to rake the leaves, they were frozen to the ground.

*

My Christmas shopping is nearly done, and I can sum it up in two words:  E and Bay. Regina Doman has called Ebay "the world's largest garage sale," only unlike garage sales, this one actually has what you set out to look for, more or less (usually more).  This week my fingers have gone merrily wandering through pages of vintage religious medals, vintage jewelry, military surplus goods, and tiny pewter warrior-mouse figurines which weren't really intended for Redwall fans, but will do. The Redwall fan in question does not read this blog, and those who do may keep their mouths shut, thank you.

And so far I've done a decent job of adhering to "something to read, something to wear, something to play with," though what a 16-year-old "plays with," exactly, is a little harder to pin down than what a seven-year-old plays with.

*

Some alternative personality typed the words My Christmas shopping is nearly done. That cannot have been me.

*

Epiphany has acquired a pea coat. She's been wearing it around the house and declaring, "It's toasty in here!"

*

Oh, I also did some Etsy shopping. A little girl who does not read this blog is getting a lovely fairy doll from Saint Anne's Pixies,  plus a set of vintage enamelware dollhouse dishes from another vendor. Those who do read this blog may keep their mouths shut, as above.  

*

The children have memorized the UPS man's schedule, as the dog has memorized his feeding times.

*

What, seven already? OK, I have Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, which I've wanted to read for years, here on the shelf beside me. The sun is shining outside. The big kids have gone with Aelred to Mass;  the younger (cannot say little)  kids, who have apparently forgotten how to fall asleep at night, aren't up yet. The dog, having inhaled half his breakfast down his trachea, has recovered and is snoring on his bed under the window. It's the meditative quiet of morning, as opposed to the meditative quiet of the deep of the night, when I sat up sewing seed beads onto a blue-felt Mary, for a sparkly halo, under the dining-room light.

So I think I'll make another cup of chai, open my book, and not think about how much more math we need to finish before Christmas, for a little while, anyway.

PS:  Thanks to Jen for hosting Seven Quick Takes. She's talking about trying to like Santa;  my thoughts on the subject are represented here.

On the Reliability of Sources

Disgruntled child, on waking up to no snow:  

 Don't ever trust computer weather. You have to listen to the television.

(we don't actually have a television, dooming him to a life of conflict with the specious forces of an informationally precarious world. oh well)


Meanwhile, I guess I do have to plan Greek class. 

Beauty on a Frozen Afternoon

Why Does the Prospect of Christmas Make Me So Stee-ew-pid, and Other Questions About the Way the World Is Arranged

I live with these people 365 days a year. Why the heck don't I know what they want for Christmas?

What are we having for Christmas dinner? Uh . . . a goose? Or game hens? Or Spam? Really, I have no idea.

Why is it that Saint Lucy's feast day can start so magically, with happy girls making Swedish pancakes and nobody too terribly upset that I won't let them wear candles on their heads;  and end with people rolling on the floor together and being sent to bed early and told in no uncertain terms that a Scout Christmas potluck, say, on Tuesday of this week, is a privilege and not a right,  if they get my drift? Why?

What is it about the new ottoman that the dog likes so much? Is it that the factory forgot to include the extra box of screw-on legs, so that the ottoman proper, as it reposes upon the floor of the living room, seems more like just a sort of really thick dog bed, or what? (Or is it that I happen to be sitting in the rocking chair next to the ottoman, and whither thou goest, &c?)

Of what malady did three of the five new fish in the fish tank die last Wednesday, and why did it have to strike them all in the space of the very half-hour in which we were trying to copy the first stanza of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening?"

When are those people I sent upstairs to bed at 6:45 actually going to fall asleep?

Do 13-year-old boys like Army-issue mosquito netting? I mean, as a stocking stuffer?

Should I worry that the bannister is wobbling like that?

Is the wind going to blow the five Christmas wreaths off my front porch tonight, or is it not? And if it does, will it blow them into the driveway, or all the way into the yard next door, with the grouchy menopausal dog? And if the latter, how long will it take me to make up my mind that my neighbor is welcome to them (it wouldn't take me any time to decide this, except that I made them, which makes me sort of attached to them, even though, as one child observed today, they really kind of don't have that much greenery on them)?

Why did two cups of coffee at four this afternoon seem like a good idea?

Did the floor slope like that when we bought this house?

What leads a person to answer an exam question thus:

Immanuel Kant is a theologian/philosopher of the modern era. His belief on faith and reason became one of his popular viewpoints where it was easily comparable to those of his time and of those in earlier years.

Oh, well. It just goes to show you. Doesn't it. At this time. 

Poetry Friday: Cold Weather in the Soul

 This is not a poem about anything real. That is, everything in it is real:  the experience of riding a bus on a snowy night, getting off and walking;  the experience of knowing that what you hoped was going to be a relationship is at a dead end;  the experience of wanting to bury that knowledge in talk. All those things are things I have lived at one point or another, but they only come together as a (hopefully sort of) coherent narrative in this poem:

Stop

As we descended from the bus,

The wind blew new snow down on us.

The windows’ urine-yellow light

Dissolved into the low pink night.

We walked a while. I saw your breath

Powder the air. You looked like death,

I thought:  hooded, silent, stalking

Me, who went on talking, talking

To fill the stinging silence up,

Drown it, smash it, make it stop.

I said your name. I guess I thought –

Well, I forget now what I thought.  

That was years and years ago:

The night, the bus, you, me, the snow.

I like writing in couplets. I like the simplicity of the scheme, the way it suggests poems for children, the way that almost anything you write works, as long as the rhyme and meter work. I like the spare look of a poem broken into couplets with white space between:  breathing space for the poem, so its silences can open out. At least, you know, that happens in poems I admire in this form;  it's what I want to happen in mine, and what I think I'm writing towards.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Jama at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup. Do visit the other participants.

UPDATE:

A reader comments that he (or she) reflexively read a full stop at the end of line 7, prompting me to try out a little tweak of that stanza. Here's how the whole poem would read:

Stop

As we descended from the bus,

The wind blew new snow down on us.

The windows’ urine-yellow light

Dissolved into the low pink night.

We walked a while. I saw your breath

Powder the air. You looked like death,

I thought:  hooded, silent, stalking.

I went on talking, talking, talking

To fill the stinging silence up,

Drown it, smash it, make it stop.

I said your name. I guess I thought –

Well, I forget now what I thought.  

That was years and years ago:

The night, the bus, you, me, the snow.

Waddya think? 

The Advent Table

In case you're wondering what that dry-clean-only shower curtain actually looks like with dishes on it.

Aaaaaand . . .

When we're not eating at this table, we're busy making Christmas presents:

(Or;  felt makes everyone a creative genius . . . )

Immaculate Mary: Some Notes (repost)

People accuse Catholics of worshipping Mary, but I loved her long before I was Catholic. Of all the practices Aelred and I acquired in our journey to Rome via Canterbury, Marian devotion seemed the greatest no-brainer. We took to it -- I, skeptic that I was, took to it -- as a baby fresh from the womb takes to breathing.

How can you not love Mary? Whenever any Gospel-writer's gaze falls upon her, she's revealed to be a person of equal parts humility and grit, a person who can stand before the Angel of God as he unfolds his bizarre and unlooked-for proposition, reply, "Whatever you say," and meet the mysterious consequences without flinching. And then, of course, the consequences are everything, and you have to thank her for taking them on.

And yet, the immaculate-conception thing:  what's that about? Of all the formal Marian dogmas, that one -- the immaculate-conception thing -- handily wins the prize for "Most Likely to Weird People Out."

Recently an online acquaintance, troubled by this dogma, asked how, exactly, being conceived without sin didn't make Mary some kind of spiritual automaton. How, he wanted to know, could someone without sin freely have said yes to God?

Well, I responded, we think of Mary as the second Eve:  an ancient tradition, founded on the passage in Genesis in which God, exiling Adam and Eve from the Garden, promises that the woman's seed shall crush the serpent beneath his heel. Eve and Mary bracket salvation history, the one introducing the sickness, the other producing the cure.

Eve, created without sin, was free to disobey. As Fr. Geoffrey Bliss writes, in his beautiful Ignatian exercises for children,

[I]n order to love, you must be free:  that means you must be able to say, "I will not love." The stars can't love God, who made them so beautiful, because they are not free.

 Of Adam and Eve in their unfallen state, Fr. Bliss continues,

[T]hey couldn't get angry or greedy or lazy without noticing it, like us, but only by wishing to. (italics mine).

They were not incapable of sin;  we know that to our sorrow. But to them, in their state of grace, sin was something external, to be reached out and taken hold of, like fruit on a branch, by a conscious act of will. They had to want it, and they could want it, and they did want it, and here we all are.

Now, even in my own decidedly fallen state, I can have glimpses of what it means to be in a state of grace  like that. I'm as lousy with selfishness and avarice and corruption as the next person, but certain sins tempt me less than others. I've never been at all tempted -- actively tempted, as in, I had to resist the impulse -- to shoplift from a store.  I have my compulsions, but that's not one of them. I can walk past alluring merchandise without wanting to slip it into the fetching black fabric grocery bag which I generally carry for a purse;  I can buy embarrassing things like nit combs and hemorrhoid cream and tampons and Gas-X without turning a hair -- I mention these items not because, at this stage, we're lousy with actual lice, for example, but because things like this, all of which I have bought at one time or another, are regularly purloined by people with a misplaced sense of shame.

Shoplifting doesn't tempt me. But occasionally, as I'm standing in the checkout line consumed with boredom, because I really do try not to read the fronts of the tabloids, or to care whether or not Michelle Obama hates Oprah or Oprah hates Michelle Obama or both of them hate Dr. Phil, my eye will fall on something else -- a tube of Burt's Bees lip balm, say -- and I'll wonder to myself whether I could get away with stealing it. Would a tiny thing like that set off the alarm at the door? Are there tiny security cameras in Oprah's eyes, there on the front of the O magazine? Is the lady behind me, in her sequined Christmas-tree sweater, really a store detective? If I just picked it up and looked at it, and then kept holding it, and then casually dropped it into my bag as I pretended to fumble with my wallet -- could I do it?

I know that the possibility is there for me to do this bad thing. As a thought exercise, it's mildly interesting. I don't have to do it -- one thing I'm not, really, is a natural ripper-off of Burt's Bees lip balm. That's not to say that I couldn't become a natural ripper-off. That it's not part of my nature right now doesn't mean I couldn't cultivate it as a second nature. But so far, I haven't, and I don't have any plans to start.


Now here's the question:  in this instance, isolated though it may be in my case, when I am more or less free of the learned behavior of sin -- well, that's my question, really. Absent the habit of shoplifting, when I walk into the store am I more free, or less? Would I be more myself, unique among humans, or less, if I couldn't walk past the pomegranate oil lip balm -- which I do dearly love, I must say -- without slipping it into my bag? Does the fact that I can walk past it make all my choices and actions less my own? In that moment of non-temptation, am I me, or a God-bot?

*

On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Father likes to speak not of Mary's perfection, but of her perseverance. It is one thing, he says, to be born without sin -- to be born "born again," as an evangelical might say if he could stomach this dogma. It is another thing altogether to persevere. Certainly she had to persevere:  she could love. To be able to love, she had to be free not to love. She had to be free to say no, to turn away, to opt for easy comfortable middle-of-the-road transient happiness. She could say no;  she does say yes. Given freedom, she perseveres in obedience on a higher, more difficult road.

It's only what we, fallen as we are, can do in those isolated moments when the yes isn't so difficult, and we're allowed a tiny glimpse of what our whole nature is meant to be:  free to disobey, free of the burning habit of disobedience which brings us grief, over and over again. Mary gives us a greater vision of the life we aspire to, the freedom we will have when the habits of sin fall away from us forever, with their enslavements. The life she has is the life God intends for all of us and has done for us, as for her, by the coming of the Son.

A Little Potpourri of Links for the Day:  

Music for the Immaculate Conception.
Ineffabilis Deus:  The Dogma Defined
History and Significance of the Dogma
Debunking Objections
More From Fish Eaters
Free Printable Activities, Lessons, and Crafts
Love2Learn: December Resources
More From Les Femmes: The Truth
And More!


ALSO:  

Something About Mary: A Feminist Feast

Now, I had always figured that Mary must have been a major source of information for the Gospel writers;  it wouldn't have struck me that this would have been all that "suppressed," even if the Gospels aren't full of And then Mrs. Carpenter dished to me, in an exclusive interview, what really happened at the Cana Society Wedding of the Millennium . . .

And  I don't, myself, particularly feel the need to make this a "feminist feast," as opposed to any other ordinary old kind of feast, though Mary as a role model for calm in the face of unnerving situations is a good image to hold in the mind. For that matter, now that I think of it, so is Ma Ingalls in the Little House books.

The world is full of strong, brave, calm women. We admire them rightly;  some of them we even venerate, our particular heroines. Still and all, there's only one second Eve, one "clean slate," one human mother whose body cradled God and gave Him flesh.

AND 

Why an Immaculate Conception?  (via The Wine-Dark Sea) 
Naked at Pentimento

Penitence Is a Lovely Hue

I had to ask myself what a tablecloth this pretty, and in such obviously pristine condition, was doing in  the thrift store up the street, tumbled among the queen-sized sateen sheets embroidered with the name Angelica, until I realized that it was a shower curtain marked "Dry Clean Only."

Just let that sink in, why don't you.

Anyway, it makes a great tablecloth, and so far, after forty-eight hours' worth of meals, including one seven-year-old's birthday party, it's come clean with gentle sponging, so I haven't had to find out how serious that dry-cleaning directive really is. What we have here is a sort of confession-vs-purgatory metaphor, which I think I will not belabor, actually, at this time.

Also, it's something of an answer to semi-coherent prayer, on the theme of Advent is happening, but not to me. Now, suddenly, here it is. Advent would have been happening anyway, mind you, because objective reality does not hinge on my state of mind, and thank God for that. But now it's happening at my kitchen table, out where everyone can see it all day long, and that makes a difference.

Saint Nicholas has been to see us;  he left oranges and dollar bills in the children's shoes and Santa figurines of various shapes and sizes and degrees of seriousness throughout the house. That's his job around here:  that, and serving God like the rest of us, only in a higher-gloss finish. We're the flat paint, see, the kind that shows two years' worth of handprints like persistent bad weather all down the stairs, and he's the -- oh, never mind. Enough with the metaphorical again. Suffice it to say that some of the richest theological conversations I have had with my children have been about Saint Nicholas and the work that he does among us, the servants who struggle to be of assistance.

On another note, here's a little excerpt of something I wrote last Advent:

I dealt with these things in Confession last night, particularly my own tendency towards reserve. I am by nature, in person, rather reserved, and while on one level that's simply a personality type, on another level, it occurred to me, I had to ask myself what, exactly, I was reserving, and what the import of that might be. We can, I thought, hang onto our selves in the same way that we're stingy with our money, keeping ourselves at a distance even from people we love, not to mention strangers -- who could be, at any time, angels we entertain, or not, unawares.

Here's a small instance, an illustration which I shared with my confessor. Yesterday at Mass I was the second person to go forward for Communion. An older man whom I know only by sight had knelt already at the rail. The way the rail is set up, there's a short segment flanking the center gate on each side, with its own short kneeler, and then a longer section of rail flanking that -- if that makes sense. Instinctively, instead of kneeling beside the man at the short section of rail, I moved over to the longer section, leaving a space. I didn't think about it until I'd done it, and by then it was too late, but all the rest of the day, I said to myself, "That wasn't very friendly. Why didn't I kneel next to that man?" It was a small thing, but completely in character:  in a movie theater, I'd take an empty row for myself. I'd far rather buy my gas at the pump, with a credit card, than go inside and speak to the cashier. In fact, even on empty, I have passed gas stations without credit-card pumps, holding out for one which wouldn't require me to deal with a person.

At any rate, I hadn't meant to, of course, but I'd done something, even a tiny thing, which was self-withholding and lacking in charity. Now, I really didn't beat myself up over it all day, and I didn't think that in itself it had been an overtly sinful thing to do, but it showed me something about myself which carries over even into my closest relationships. If, I had to ask myself, I don't risk much with people I love, if I can't be bothered to bestir myself to greater affection,  if I keep myself shut in a hard little nut of the soul, then the odds are that I'm doing it to God as well.

Now, I'm writing all this not to invite a lot of psychoanalysis. You'll just have to trust me that I am this way;  if you say that you are, too, I'll trust you to know what you're talking about. If you say you're not, I'll trust that as well. I bring it all up merely to say that Advent is, still, a season of making your house fair -- the house of the soul as well as the house of the house. And all these things seem to me to be part of the clutter of sloth and acedia, and to the extent that they become acts of the will, they are sinful. At any rate,  I came from Confession lighter-hearted, unburdened of the weight of myself.

This is -- well, funny or awful, depending. Rereading this passage, part of a much longer post,  I was struck by the fact that I'd just been to Confession this past Saturday, and that although I hadn't done that same exact thing again -- by golly, if you're kneeling at that rail, even if you haven't showered since 1873 (and are therefore a reeking corpse), I will cuddle right up next to you, though not so much as to make you uncomfortable, of course -- whatever it was that I did confess prompted my confessor to say, in essence, and in the kindest way imaginable, that I really, really, really needed to get over myself. So, plus ca change, I guess. But as always, I walked out feeling that my soul had just dropped ten pounds, and that the windows of my interior house sparkled with sunlight, from inside.

Spam Email I Almost Opened and Other Doings

I mean, the subject line said I'd get 77% off (of what I don't know), but then warned me to "be guide maintained." Ho-KAY. Duly noted. Delete.

For her birthday, which is tomorrow, Crispina has acquired a betta fish in a vase. We used to have, as longtime readers will recall, a fish named Alfie -- Alpha Betta, york york -- who used to travel back and forth to Tennessee in a jam jar, and who was as good as a dog to us, at least until we had a dog, at which time Alfie was relegated to the role of really great fish, with all the obvious fish limitations. We had him from Easter of 2008 until January of this year, and of us all, Crispina mourned him the hardest, possibly because of us all, she was the only one who really lived in the daily assumption that whatever is alive will be alive forever, and was therefore slapped in the face more than the rest of us by the outrage of fish death.

Anyway, we have -- she has -- a new betta now, who may well also be named Alfie, though she's entertained thoughts of calling him Beta. When I suggested Gamma as a possibility, she looked at me in disgust. The new Alfie, or Beta, or Zeta, or Upsilon, or Xi, or whatever the heck we're going to call him, is a handsome fish, more royal-blue than the old Alfie, with dramatic, shredded-looking fins (we have been assured that they're supposed to look that way, but the old Alfie's didn't, and the look of this fish's fins worried me at first). He is handsomely accommodated, too, in a vase, as I said, with glass jewels in the bottom and a nice big water plant growing out of it. For now he resides in the sunroom, on the desk beneath the south window where Crispina likes to sit and play with little dolls and dollhouse furniture, and I'm hoping he'll stay warm enough there. As I recall, the great challenge in betta-keeping is maintaining the kind of water temperature you'd find in a rice paddy in Thailand. But there he is, and long may he prosper.

Meanwhile, I have been home-improving again. Shoot me, please. I mean, okay, it's Advent, we're having people over tomorrow, and my mother is coming for Christmas, so what could be more logical than to start stripping paint off a windowframe? I have nothing else to do with my time, right? And, because of course when you begin home-improvement projects naturally you start with something small and inconspicuous, I decided to attack the big front window in the living room. That decision wasn't altogether irrational. Some months ago Aelred had tried to jimmy open that window, which has been painted shut since probably about 1942, so that we could take off the storm window and wash everything. We never did get the window open, but he managed to flake a good bit of paint off before conceding defeat.

Ever since then, the cracks and gaps in the paint have been shedding little chips onto the floor for me to vacuum up, and today I think I just lost my mind. I went to the store, bought paint stripper and safety masks and a putty knife -- why I bought the putty knife I don't know, because we had dozens of them in our kitchen junk drawer already -- and went to work on one side of the frame. I got off most of the top layer, revealing a layer of a sort of putty color, which actually looks rather nice against the cream walls. About the only sane thing I've done is to decide to work in tiny increments, accomplishing what I can in an hour or so of scraping and sanding, then cleaning up the space and putting the chairs back where they belong.

So we have this very process effect going on, which is an improvement on the by the way, you might have noticed that the entire room has been dismantled look which accompanied my projects in the old house, and which Aelred, who could not have failed to notice that the entire room had been dismantled, tended to regard with something like dread. If I happen to pick at a loose edge of wallpaper, as I am wont to do, because I like to see what's under things -- well, if visions of drywall compound and two weeks of scrambled eggs for dinner dance in his head when I do things like that, it's not entirely without reason. I was a little afraid of what he might say about the window -- a thought which struck me only after I'd stripped off too much paint not to keep going, which is the same as way too much paint to pretend you haven't done anything -- but he was very cheerful and agreed with me that I could hardly make it look worse than it already did. What to do to it once the paint is off is another mystery, though of course "nothing" is always a live option. As are  curtains.

Epiphany has just finished icing Crispina's birthday cake:  pink, with purple icing between the layers. We had bought birthday candles at the store but now can't find them, and once again I forgot to buy Advent candles for the Advent wreath I should have made last week and been lighting all this time but haven't gotten around to yet. This is my favorite season, really it is. It's just that lately I haven't been very good at it.  I think I'll remedy that the only way I know how:   by going to bed.