Eclectic Experiment

Why I love country music

2010-01-19T17:38:00.002-05:00

They have some of the best lyrics:

I hate that stupid old pickup truck,
You never let me drive
You’re a redneck, heartbreak
Who’s really bad at lying
So watch me strike a match
On all my wasted time
As far as I’m concerned,
You’re just another picture to burn.
(Taylor Swift)

Husslers shootin' eightball
Throwin' darts at the wall
Feelin' damn near 10 ft. tall
Here she comes, Lord help us all
Ol' T.W.'s girlfriend done slapped him out' his chair
Poor ole boy, it ain't his fault
It's so hard not to stare
At that honky tonk badonkadonk
Keepin' perfect rhythm
Make ya wanna swing along
Got it goin' on
Like Donkey Kong
And whoo-wee
Shut my mouth, slap your grandma
There outta be a law
Get the Sheriff on the phone
Lord have mercy, how's she even get them britches on
That honky tonk badonkadonk
(sung by Trace Adkins)

How do you like me now,
Now that I'm on my way?
Do you still think I'm crazy
Standin here today?
I couldnt make you love me
But I always dreamed about living in your radio
How do you like me now?
(Toby Keith)

He's a good-time cowboy casanova
Leaning up against the record machine
He looks like a cool drink of water
But he's candy-coated misery
He's the devil in disguise
A snake with blue eyes
And he only comes out at night
Gives you feelings that you don't want to fight
You better run for your life
(Carrie Underwood)

And, of course, my favorite:

Well, I know sometimes you think that all you really are,
Is the woman with the kids an' the groceries in the car.
An' you worry about your hips an' you worry about your age.
Meanwhile I'm tryin' to catch the breath you take away.
Oh, an' believe me, you still do.
Baby, all I see, when I look at you,

Is one hot mama;
You turn me on, let's turn it up,
An' turn this room into a sauna.
One hot mama,
Oh, whaddya say, baby?
You wanna?

In memory of Isaac

2009-12-26T08:44:00.002-05:00

Isaac William Gwaltney
Born and reborn December 26, 1987

Visitor From Heaven
Twila Paris

A visitor from Heaven
If only for a while
A gift of love to be returned
We think of you and smile

A visitor from Heaven
Accompanied by grace
Reminding of a better love
And of a better place

With aching hearts and empty arms
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we’re so glad you came
We’re so glad you came

A visitor from Heaven
If only for a day
We thank Him for the time He gave
And now it’s time to say
We trust you to the Father’s love
And to His tender care
Held in the everlasting arms
And we’re so glad you’re there
We’re so glad you’re there

With breaking hearts and open hands
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we’re so glad you came
We’re so glad you came

Overparenting

2009-11-28T10:07:00.001-05:00

"Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind."

Nancy Gibbs
Can These Parents Be Saved?
Time Magazine Nov 30th

A pointless exercise

2009-08-04T11:58:00.004-05:00

I was born 54 years ago
I graduated from high school 37 years ago.
I bought my first car (for $500) 37 years ago.
I was married 34 years ago.
I went to Europe 33 years ago.
I was divorced 30 years ago.
I gave my last horse away to a friend 29 years ago.
I graduated from college 27 years ago.
I moved to NC 27 years ago.
I met Will 26 years ago.
I married Will 25 years ago.
I worked my last day of a full-time job 24 years ago.
I had my first child 24 years ago.
My second child died at birth 21 years ago.
I started homeschooling 19 years ago.
We moved to Alabama 18 years ago.
We returned to NC 13 years ago.
My youngest child was born 12 years ago.
My oldest child graduated from college and was married 1 year ago.
I joined the Catholic Church 3 weeks ago.

Coming "home" to the RCC

2009-07-13T14:11:00.005-05:00

This is mostly a reprint of something I posted on my wall on facebook.

I joined the Catholic church in a Rite of Reception yesterday, July 12th. Of course no one thought to bring a camera, so there are no pictures. It's a shame, because I looked good! ;-) (Even though I was nervous!)

Will was my sponsor, which was comforting. Father John loves the anointing oil, so he poured a liberal amount on my head in the shape of a cross, and then rubbed it down my forehead and cheeks. I dripped for several hours until I could shower! It smells wonderful, though, so I didn't mind much looking like a drowned rat.

When I came back down the aisle to Will after taking communion (the new members take first), he was crying. We knelt together and he just held my arm and cried quietly for a while. It was very sweet. ...

The Liturgy of the Eucharist really did take on special meaning for me once I knew I could fully participate. I felt like I was hearing and saying all of it for the first time.

Deciding to join the RCC was a leap of faith, even with all the careful consideration I put into it over the past three years. In the end I had to just step up and do it. In some ways the deciding factor was the structure, freedom within boundaries meant a true freedom for me. I finally realized that I have felt like so much depended on me in the past, and now I don't. I love the Sacraments because they are God's doing. They work because he wills it. Not because of me, or the priest, but because God wills it. I get grace no matter what. I get to stop trying to interpret God or His will. I get to receive and then, hopefully, spread it around. I don't' have to be careful with it. I can love recklessly and let God sort it all out.

The structure of the RCC and of the Mass specifically allows me to not only be free, but to grab on when I don't know what to do or how to feel...which is often. The liturgy lays the path out for me to follow, and again, God's will means the path is right.

I still have many question and confusions about the Church. And I know they are as screwed up as any other church or institution. But to paraphrase one of the disciples, "Where else would I go? You alone can show me the truth."

Thank you to all my friends who have influenced me, supported me, prayed for me, admonished me, challenged me, changed me, argued with me, and loved me. I thank God for you daily.

Edited to Add: Will wants me to make sure everyone knows he cried in a very manly way. ;-)

Marriage, revisited

2009-06-23T08:48:00.003-05:00

I recently had a conversation with Julie about marriage. Her question was whether we should reverence long-term marriages. It's a good post and a good conversation. Check it out if you haven't already.

My take, much distilled, is that marriage shouldn't be reverenced at all, but relationships need to be supported and nurtured. I also pointed out that for whatever reason, people still want/need long-term, committed relationships. We seem to be built that way. Whether it's family, friends, or lovers, we want people who will be in our lives for the long haul, and ending those relationships is extrememly painful.

Last night while I lounged on the bed sporadically reading my book, Iturned on the TV and caught part of a movie titled Shall We Dance? The movie is so-so, but it has an interesting message about marriage, midlife changes, and "finding yourself." (How cliche is that?) The character played by Susan Sarandon hires a private investigator because she thinks her husband is having an affair. The PI asks a rhetorical question at one point- "Why do people still want to get married?" Sarandon's character gives this answer, "People get married to have a witness for their life." She goes on to expand on that thought in a short monologue that I think is full of truth and insight. We live on a crowded planet. Marriage, or any long-term relationship, helps give our life continuity and meaning. Having someone witness our life helps validate it. I know as I get older the people who have known me for 10, 15, or even 20 years hold a special place in my life. They have the back story, they know the score, and they are still there. Witnessing my life, giving it meaning, supporting and loving me. In a society where other long-term relationships are fragile- community, friends, extended family- we want to think someone is committed to being there, not leaving, not moving away, but always there giving continuity to our days. Our lives are like art masterpieces that need viewers to appreciate them. What do they matter if no one is there to share the joy, beauty, and pain? Lovers, friends, families, communities all give our lives that shared meaning.

Why do people still hope and pray marriage works? At least partly because we want someone there to witness our life so we know it matters; that we matter.

42 hours alone

2009-06-21T12:37:00.002-05:00

True confession time. I think I'm turning into a closet introvert. For the past few years my evenings have consisted mainly of me retiring to my room to surf the web, read, or watch TV. Hopefully, by myself. And now I've spent the last 42 hours by myself, mainly in my house, alone, and it's been blissful. Heaven. Like getting into a warm, scented bath on a winter evening, or downing that first drink of something cool and wet after mowing the lawn, or jogging in the heat. For 42 hours no one talked to me, no one needed anything, and no one needed a ride anywhere. No deadlines.

I've watched five movies. I've read for hours. I ate only what and when I wanted. I exercised when I felt like it. I spent over an hour in a book store just browsing. I did laundry and cleaned my bathroom, but I even enjoyed that.

I never thought a weekend to myself as very appealing. I've known people to go on silent retreats and I thought that was cool, but not for me. Maybe it's age. Who knows. But while I love, love, love to spend time with my husband, and I enjoy my children and friends, I find I enjoy myself, too. And I find I really enjoy watching movies alone. And I like to read. And I like to "waste" time doing almost nothing.

I'm looking forward to my week alone with Will in July. That's a different and wonderful kind of alone time, and I treasure it even more than time totally alone. But totally alone has grown in appeal, at least for 42 hours. That's probably just the right amount of time. Or maybe about 42 more would be nice, too.

Checking in

2009-05-21T10:55:00.004-05:00

I'm mostly posting to keep my blog from being blown away into cyberspace. I need to grab some posts that I like off of here before I let it die it's much overdue death. In the future I may feel a need to write down my thought processes again, but not now. Writing isn't a natural medium for me. If there are thoughts crowding in my head dying to get out, they will simply spew out of my mouth, for better or worse. I talk; I'm a talker. That's what I do.

It's not that I don't think I can write. I do okay, much better than 10, or even 5, years ago. But I'll never be a writer. I have no compulsion to write, no story that is dying to get out, no poem dancing in my head, no pithy sayings ready to edify anyone who stumbles on them.

I don't want to post about the inner workings of my mind. I don't want to lay my mid-life crises open to inspection. No one really needs to hear how I'm handling the approach of another birthday or the disappointment over the choices of one of my children. I don 't want to talk about current events, religion, or politics. I don't know who's right or wrong...or if anyone is.

If I could write a story, or describe witty scenes of my life, I might keep going. But honestly, my days are pretty normal and my experiences not all that unique. I laugh and I cry. I fight my personal demons and my own character flaws. I succeed more times than I should, and fail more times than I like. I love my children. I love my husband. I haven't figured out the meaning of life. I haven't figured out how to live life to the fullest yet.

Some days I am who my husband sees me to be: strong, capable, loving, smart, and sexy. Some days I'm the person I dislike the most: paralyzed, petty, selfish, and indulgent. Some days I marvel at my own strength, other days I cringe at my own weakness. I don't expect too many people are very interested in reading about either version. ;-)

So all you writers out there keep clacking away at those keyboards. We need you. Those of us who don't write need to have something to fill our time!

Reading romances

2009-01-28T22:19:00.004-05:00

I actually slid into reading romance novels by reading a mystery series that had a complex, believable romance intertwined with it. Even though the two main characters get married in the second or third book, the author takes her time exploring this relationship between a Hispanic divorced, former narcotics cop (reformed alcoholic), and a young widow in California over the course of 7 or 8 books. The clash of cultures, backgrounds, and experiences that were frankly more interesting than the actual mysteries. Her books didn't have any sex, just sexual tension, romance, and relationship struggles. (The author is Earlene Fowler and her books are found in the mystery section of the bookstore, not romance).

I was reading Fowler's website when I clicked some links to "romance" authors. Fowler admits her books cross genres, and obviously enjoys both romance and mystery books. I've since come to understand that romance crosses boundaries with mystery and sci-fi/fantasy so deeply that some books are shelved both places in bookstores. BTW- romances are loosely divided into historical, contemporary, paranormal (werewolves, vampires, etc), sci-fi, and suspense/action.

Okay, so that sets up the background. From Fowler's link I found other authors and started checking them out at the library. I started with mysteries. Charlaine Harris has several series, and they vary in their sexual content. The lighter series is the Aurora Teagarden series. A grittier series, with more sex, is the Lily Bard series. Her sexier, much weirder, often humorous series is the Southern Vampire (also called Sookie Stackhouse) series. The HBO show True Blood is based on these books.

From the mysteries with some sexual content, I "graduated" to the romance with a little action/mystery. ;-) The difference is subtle sometimes, but the major component is that the relationship is as important as any other plot line in the book, maybe more so. One of the first authors was Susanne Brockman. She writes a decent suspense/action book filled with hunky ex-Navy SEALS and such. Her plots and characterizations are decent. Her story is as important as the relationship, and she's good with the sexual tension part. Many of her books are about the same group of people, just focusing on different characters. One main character is gay. She has a gay son (she writes about him in a moving prologue), and she does a decent job with that character and his relationship. Two of my favorites are Bodyguard and Flashpoint.

Other decent suspense/romance or mystery/romance authors where the plot is as important as the romance aspect.:
Penny McCall
Susanne Enoch (series starting with Flirting With Danger)
Nora Roberts (She writes all types of romance, and she writes futuristic detective type stories as J. D. Robb. One of my favorites is High Noon- not a western, btw.)
Linda Howard- some are good, some so-so.

I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy, and some of the better books of the romance genre are cross-overs in these categories. My favorite author is Linnea Sinclair. She writes strong female characters who aren't dominated by their sexy male counterpoints. She writes good sci-fi plots and has well-visualized universe. Games of Command is probably my favorite, but I've liked all her books.

Other good sci-fi/fantasy authors:
Ann Aguirre
Jeaniene Frost
Eve Kenin
Patricia Brigg (especially her Mercy Thompson series. She is not a romance author, but romance is part of her books. She is probably considered a YA author by some, but one or two of her books get a little racy for young teens.)

Okay, please note: Many of the books I mentioned have fairly graphic sex scenes somewhere in the book. Mostly the characters aren't married when this happens. If you don't like reading about pre-marital sex, these books aren't for you. ;-) If you'd rather no sex, one excellent author of Regency period romances, known for historic accuracy, wonderful dialog, great plots, and detailed characters is Georgette Heyer. Her books are being reprinted and are truly wonderful reads.

Have You Ever....

2009-01-22T20:47:00.003-05:00

In the spirit of Random Things and getting to know you better, I'll add this list. Thanks to my friend, Beth.

01. Start your own blog -- Yes
02. Sleep under the stars -- Yes
03. Play in a band -- No
04. Visit Hawaii -- Yes, but I was young
05. Watch a meteor shower -- Yes
06. Give more than you can afford to charity -- No
07. Go to Disneyworld -- No, but I went to Disneyland as a child.
08. Climb a mountain -- No
09. Hold a praying mantis -- Yes
10. Sing a solo -- No
11. Bungee jump -- No
12. Visit Paris -- No
13. Watch a lightning storm at sea -- Yes
14. Teach yourself an art technique -- Yes
15. Adopt a child -- No
16. Eat sushi -- Yes, well I tried. Ick.
17. Walk to the top of the Statue of Liberty -- No
18. Grow your own vegetables -- Yes
19. See the Mona Lisa in France -- No
20. Sleep on an overnight train -- Yes
21. Have a pillow fight -- Yes
22. Hitch hike -- NO
23. Look at the rings of Saturn through a telescope -- Yes
24. Build a snow fort -- Yes
25. Hold a lamb -- Yes
26. Climb to the top of a lighthouse -- Yes
27. Run a Marathon -- No
28. Ride in a gondola in Venice -- No
29. See a total eclipse -- Yes
30. Watch a sunrise or sunset -- Yes
31. Hit a home run -- No
32. Go on a cruise -- Yes
33. See Niagara Falls in person -- No
34. Visit the birthplace of your ancestors -- Yes- it helps when some are Native Americans.
35. Visit an Amish community -- Yes
36. Teach yourself a new language -- No, I tried and failed.
37. Have enough money to be truly satisfied -- Yes
38. See the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person -- No
39. Go rock climbing -- Not formally. I've climbed rocks.
40. See Michelangelo's David -- No
41. Sing karaoke in public -- No
42. See Old Faithful geyser erupt in person -- No
43. Buy a stranger a meal at a restaurant -- Yes
44. Visit Africa -- No
45. Walk on a beach by moonlight -- Yes
46. Ride in a helicopter -- Yes
47. Have your portrait painted -- No
48. Go deep sea fishing -- Hmmm...I don't really know. I've been fishing in a boat off the Bahamas. Is that "deep sea"?
49. See the Sistine Chapel in person -- No
50. Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris -- No
51. Go scuba diving or snorkeling -- Yes
52. Kiss in the rain -- Yes
53. Play in the mud -- Yes
54. Watch a movie at a drive-in theater -- Yes
55. Be in a movie -- No
56. Visit the Great Wall of China -- No
57. Start a business -- No
58. Take a martial arts class -- Yes
59. Visit Russia -- No
60. Serve meals at a soup kitchen -- No
61. Sell Girl Scout cookies -- No
62. Go whale watching -- No
63. Get or send flowers for no reason -- Yes
64. Donate blood, platelets or plasma -- Yes to all three.
65. Go sky diving -- No
66. Visit a Nazi Concentration Camp -- No.
67. Adopt a pet from a rescue shelter -- Yes
68. Pilot an airplane -- No
69. Save a favorite childhood toy -- Yes- not a toy, but a iron statue of a horse I got when I was 7.
70. Visit the Lincoln Memorial -- Yes
71. Eat Caviar -- Yes, ick.
72. Make a quilt -- No
73. Stand in Times Square -- Yes
74. Tour the Everglades -- No
75. Visit the Viet Nam Memorial -- No
76. See the Changing of the Guard in London -- No
77. Drive a race car -- No
78. Ride on a speeding motorcycle -- Yes
79. See the Grand Canyon in person -- No
80. Publish a book -- No
81. Visit the Vatican -- No
82. Buy a brand new car -- Yes
83. Walk in Jerusalem -- No
84. Have your picture in the newspaper -- Yes
85. Read the entire Bible -- No
86. Visit the White House -- No
87. Kill and prepare an animal for eating -- No
88. Hike the Appalachian Trail -- Yes, a part of it.
89. Save someone's life -- No
90. Sit on a jury -- No, I was called for jury duty but never sat on a jury
91. Meet someone famous -- Yes, I think so.
92. Join a book club --Yes
93. Own an iPod -- Yes
94. Have a Facebook page -- Yes
95. See the Alamo in person -- Yes
96. Swim in the Great Salt Lake -- No
97. Cross country snow ski -- No
98. Hold a snake -- Yes
99. See Van Gogh's Starry Night in person -- No
100. Read an entire book in one day -- Yes, many times.

25 Random Things About Me

2009-01-22T13:13:00.003-05:00

This was suppose to go on Facebook, but there are too many teens who check out my page. So I'm putting this here.

1. My parent and siblings thought I should never have children because I wouldn't be a good mom. They thought I should have a career and animals.
2. It took me many years to believe what they said wasn't true.
3. It took me a few more years to realize they really didn't mean it to be unkind. But it showed me the power of words in a person's life. Be careful what you tell a child they can or cannot do. They believe you.
4. It was after my divorce at 24 that I realized what I wanted was a husband, home, and family.
5. I spent 4 years working with race horses and living on racetacks up and down the east coast, from 20-24. I was alternately an exercise rider and a groom.
6. Horses are my first love. I haven't really been around them in years, but I know exactly how they feel, small, and sound. They will always be the most beautiful things on earth to me.
7. I gave up horses to be a wife and mother. I don't regret it, but I miss it. I believe life is about choices and that "having it all" is a myth that breeds discontent and heartache.
8. This past year I've started reading romance novels for fun. I'm not into the historic bodice-rippers, but I like the contemporary romantic suspense or sci-fi novels. Even the risque ones.
9. I'm an extrovert. I get energy from being around people. But I'm more likely to want to be home these days than out and about. Maybe it's because I've got enough people around me here that I don't need to venture far from home for company.
10. Fridays after I teach at Providence are my favorite times of the week. I don't have any commitments and no deadlines. I get into pj's and curl up with a good book or a movie. Bliss.
11. I went skinny dipping in the ocean off the NJ shore long years ago. That was during my racetrack years.
12. I'm not really fond of ice cream. Homemade is good, store-bought I can pass on.
13. I can't pass on homemade cookies (although I almost never eat packaged ones). I'll eat my weight in just about any homemade cookie. Hense the reason I don't make cookies.
14. I don't really know what I believe anymore, but I'm less worried about it than when I thought I knew. I've stopped trying to pin God down. I can recite the Nicene creed and believe it. I just don't sweat the details anymore.
15. I'm still not 100% sure about what to about church. I like the Catholic Mass, but shy away from the commitment of joining. I'm not much into obligations right now.
16. I've never been skiing, or ice skating.
17. I wear earrings every day. I rarely wear any other jewelry except my wedding rings. I feel really naked without earrings.
18. When I'm feeling stressed or depressed, I can read an entire average-length book in a day or less. One month last summer I read close to 50 books.
19. I don't really mind clutter in my house. I mind that other people might mind my clutter.
20. I don't like day-to-day meal making, but look forward to the day I have time to make fun and interesting dishes. I like cooking with Will.
21. I'm scared of getting Alzheimer's, like my mother.
22. I lived in Japan for a year when I was young. I've rarely worn shoes in the house since. It's just never felt right.
23. I took 4 years of French in high school and another two semesters in college. I had a decent grasp of the language. At 19 I gave up a chance to go to Paris for a month to live with a family and speak only French. I gave it up 'cause my boyfriend was angry I was going. Not THAT, I regret to this day. That was the guy I married and divorced.
24. I am a master procrastinator. I'm doing that now, writing this and not grading papers due tomorrow.
25. For two hours every Friday I have a room full of teens for Biology. I like these kids. And for two hours I try to accept them unconditionally. I don't think about what I know of them outside of class, if they are "nice" or not, wild or not. I try to treat them with respect and love. To help them feel valued. I hope I succeed.

Congratulations to us! 25 Years and still loving it.

2009-01-14T09:43:00.002-05:00

To my dearest husband, Will: You are my heart.

Every year really is better than the last. Thank you.

"..the remains of a fine woman..."

2008-10-08T12:24:00.005-05:00

"Yes, there are the remains of a fine woman about Ruth." Pirates of Penzance

So says one of the pirate's, Sam when asked by Frederick whether Ruth is pretty or not. Frederick hasn't seen another woman's face since he was mistakenly placed as an apprentice to the Pirate King by his nursemaid, Ruth, at 8 years old. Fred is now 21 and Ruth 47. This is one of the pivotal points of the farce..Ruth is now a plain middle-aged woman and Fred is looking for a pretty wife.

I used to think this such a funny line, but not so much any more. Perhaps because it has been several years since I've realized it is more true than funny. Our culture isn't nice to middle-aged women, thinking them mostly to be pitied, ignored or laughed at. Mostly ignored. I tell my husband I've gradually become the invisible woman. Totally unseen in shops, restaurants, and elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong. I don't necessarily think Ruth a suitable spouse for Frederick, even in fiction. But if the situation had been a man of 47 and a woman of 21? Of course it wouldn't have been thought so unthinkable as to be immediately funny to everyone. "Wink, wink, nod, nod, say-no-more, say-no-more." We all get the absurdity of a handsome young man marrying a plain middle-aged woman.

"There are the remains of a fine woman....." Honestly, it's a little harder to laugh at this when you feel the force of the truth in it all too well. There are many things I like about getting older, and maybe even wiser, but what time does to the body isn't one of those things.

Lifting the Curtain

2008-08-14T18:50:00.005-05:00

I had an epiphany today. I realized that as a "good Christian," I'd basically rewritten 14 years of my life, from age 14 to 28. I'd taken the R and X-rated truth and made it PG for the benefit of my family and friends. I quickly picked up on the expectations that if there were egregious sins in my past they weren't to be mentioned except obliquely, and then only to "give my testimony" about how God saved me from my wicked ways.

I complied. I was ashamed, even horrified, by my past. I buried it and praised God for forgiveness and another chance. But midlife reevaluation has hit and now I realize something. I hate having almost a third of my life hidden behind a veil, shut away even from me. No one really knows me, because what I went through those years is an important part of who I am. Along with the things I did that I really do regret, there are some gems. There are relationships that may not have been good choices, but were, and are, sweet memories. I've hidden almost everything for years in fear that anyone who knew what I was really capable of would reject me. All those Christians would be horrified. And I think there is truth in that fear.

I'm not interested in bragging about indiscretion or flaunting sinful behavior. And I would be more than sad to see my children making the decisions I made. I'm not glorifying or rationalizing. What I'm doing is saying is stuff happened, and it's part of who I am.

I started talking to Will about it all when a song on the radio brought back a long-forgotten memory. The memory was so powerful that it overwhelmed me, and I felt like I was shaking for several days. One of the reasons I was so shaken by it was that even though the memory should have made me feel sorrow at my actions, it only made me feel pain and a longing....a longing to remember more.

The memory was from about 30 years ago. I was 22 and had been in an emotionally and sometimes physically abusive marriage for almost three years. My husband, Dennis, was a racehorse trainer and we were stabled at Timonium, outside of Baltimore, MD. I remember it was spring and beautiful...everything smelled fresh and new. One day when I was holding a horse for our farrier, Peter, Dennis asked him if I could stay with him for the weekend. Just like that. Like I was a pet dog and Peter was going to dog-sit. Peter had been flirting outrageously with me for months, but that was par for the course at the racetrack. I was female...that was the only criteria needed for every male to make a pass at you. Pete didn't hide it from Dennis, and it didn't matter 'cause Dennis considered it a joke, or some sort of backhanded compliment. But Dennis wanted to go away for a long weekend with the owner of our racehorses, supposedly to an auction, but most likely just to party. We only had one vehicle and our apartment was 45 minutes from the track. I needed to be there each day to take care of the horses, so Dennis needed to find a solution. Pete was his solution.

Pete said sure, and I said nothing at all. Pete was a nice guy, late 20's, good looking and fit. He also drank all day from a flask of vodka and orange juice. I still remember how he always smelled..of horse, leather, vodka and orange juice.

After I finished with the horses the day Dennis left, I climbed into Peter's Volvo wagon and we drove on out to his place farther in the country. I don't remember feeling anything in particular. Perhaps I was even glad to be somewhere else for a change, for Dennis to be gone. Pete and I never even talked about it, or acted like I didn't always go home with him. I know we had a good weekend. We were at the racetrack every morning to work, and spent every afternoon together. I slept with him at night. He packed a lunch for us one day and we drove to a beautiful spot by a creek and we ate lunch and talked. On Sunday, which was Mother's Day, we helped Pete's family deliver flowers around Baltimore. That lunch and the time at the florist shop made something snap inside of me. I felt like I'd been drugged and had finally awakened. I knew I didn't have to live the way I'd been living.

When Dennis returned he picked me up at Pete's house. We all went out to dinner like it was the most normal thing in the world. Pete didn't ask me to stay, although he would have let me if I'd wanted to. I didn't want to. He was sweet, but he had a drinking problem. Plus he worked at the race track, and I was beginning to understand I couldn't stay there forever.

Pete and I remained friends, and he even recommended me as an exercise rider to the owners of Right Pot. But by the end of that summer I had decided to leave the track. Four months after that, Dennis and I officially separated. Within a year after that weekend, I was divorced and never saw Pete again.

I don't plan on dragging up episodes from my past private life for all to dissect, but at the same time I am not going to deny that they exist. Many of the memories really are painful, with no real redeeming sweetness. Maybe only Will will hear about who I was, and how that affects who I am. He assures me he'll love me just the same, and I believe him.

I really am thankful for the chance God gave me for a new life with Will. And by the way, the song that sparked the long-buried memory was Make a Memory by Bon Jovi.

My sister-in-law named 2009 Iditarod Teacher on the Trail

2008-08-13T16:53:00.006-05:00

Cathy Walters- 2009 Teacher on the Trail

My wonderful sister-in-law has been named Iditarod's 2009 Teacher on the Trail. It's an amazing amount of work, but she's so excited about the challenge. She'll spend a month in Alaska next winter before, during, and after the race. She will be flown in a small plane from checkpoint to checkpoint throughout the race, where she will file reports for teachers and students across the country to use in "real time" during the race. Throughout this year Cathy will develop curriculum and other classroom materials for use in schools across the country.

I can't tell you how proud I am of Cathy. She's always been a loving, funny, special person, and I'm so happy she's getting this once in a lifetime chance and recognition for how fantastic she is as a teacher.

You can also see a short video of her on the main Iditarod page.

My new musical find

2008-08-08T09:10:00.002-05:00

Meet Marc Broussard....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV_eeDKzqlM

I can't seem to embed the video, but it's worth following the link....

Surprise! Obama's true colors emerge.

2008-06-30T07:28:00.004-05:00

While John McCain is trying to shore up his support among conservatives by reversing himself on tax cuts, off shore drilling, and immigration, Obama has joined the "business as usual" politics with his rejection of public campaign financing and his "ruthless aversion to American Muslims." (William Falk, The Week July 4-11) According to Falk, at a rally last week in Detroit, Obama aides made two scarf-wearing Muslim women leave their seats, lest TV viewers see them in the same picture as the candidate.The NYTimes reports Obama has canceled or turned down all speaking engagements with Arab-American groups, and asked the only member of congress ever sworn in on a Koran, Keith Ellison, to cancel a planned speech on Obama's behalf.

Jay Newton of Time.com says Obama is walking a thin line. He skyrocketed to the nomination by casting himself as a principled outsider. Lately, though, the Democratic nominee has been acting like everyone else in Washington. As Richard Cohen of the Washington Post put it, instead of being the agent of change, "it's difficult to recall of a time when Obama has ever alienated his liberal base or took any real political risk."

David Brooks of the NYTimes said when Obama somehow made his "cutthroat political calculation" to reject public financing "seem like Mother Teresa's final steps to sainthood," he couldn't help feeling a little awe. This guy is good. "Even Bill Clinton wasn't smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics."

So there you are, folks. Vote for Obama if you agree with his (very liberal) economic, social, and political agendas. But don't fool yourself and think he's somehow going to "change" how politics is done. He's a politician playing the same games as all the others. His nebulous, feel-good messages of change and hope are just so much campaign fodder. McCain, who at this point really is sticking with public financing, is probably going to lose since he will have less than a third of the money that Obama will now have to work with.

Obama has shown his true agenda, and he's now going to probably win because he isn't willing to play on a level playing field. It's now "do anything to win" and then rationalize that it's for "the good of the people."

Treading water in the Tiber

2008-06-14T09:38:00.004-05:00

Well, everything is on hold again as far as joining the Catholic Church. (I'll try to get back to my story of how I got here..where ever here is...soon.)

We tried to figure out the logistics of how to join the RCC, but it didn't come out satisfactorily for me. We try to go to both churches each weekend, but the truth is Will really has to juggle to make it to mass each week, and in the Catholic Church that's a problem. I realized that I didn't want to join the church until I could mean what I promised, which would include trying my best to attend mass weekly. Right now I can't make that promise. I realized that I am too tied to the church we've been going to for years. I want to be part of that community for my kids' sakes. I enjoy the community and friendship, too, of course, but mainly I want the kids to know I'm in solidarity with them. I realized my joining another church right now, and splitting my time between them, was too much.

I support Will's decision to join the Church, and I want to continue to go with him whenever I can. Someday I will join. But right now I don't want to make any promises that I can't keep, so here I am, in the middle of the Tiber, treading water! Indecision, or in this case the decision not to make a final choice, is not a comfortable place for me, but it just might be where God wants me right now. I've always been the type to want the answers NOW, to have my life planned out with no real uncertainty. Are you laughing?? Yes, well, God chuckles at that, too, I think. In fact, the idea that there is no good answer right now is probably God's answer for me.

Maybe I'll slowly find God on His terms instead of being handed some prepackaged set of beliefs given by someone else, or lots of someone elses. I don't like not knowing what God expects, and not having any boxes to check or lists to cross off. Right now I'm not comfortable. I worry. I wonder. I fret. What should I do, where should I go, what should I believe, is this true, or is this Truth? I believe this mid-life crisis of faith is designed by God to shake me up and get me moving. God seems to do "uncomfortable" well. ;-)

Obama gets the nod...

2008-06-04T12:09:00.005-05:00

It's been a long fight in the democratic primary, as you all know if you haven't been doing research on Antarctica. But it's over. Obama makes history as the first African-American candidate for president for a major party.

This time around history was going to be made one way or another. A woman or a black man, either way it was going to open doors and, hopefully, open a few mids. That's good. I am truly pleases that women and minorities are being taken seriously in this country. I only wish I could support one of them.

But I can't.

I'm glad that this day has come, and we are taking new steps into a future not based on gender or color. I'm going to take that step boldly and say that I will not vote for someone, anyone, just because they are black or are a woman. As many news anchors commented, the actually positions held by Clinton and Obama are indistinguishable, and on too many levels those positions are untenable for me.

Obama's campaigners may all dance around to strains of "We Are the Champions" today, but what is at stake here isn't an ideal, or a feeling, or a vague sense of "change." What's at stake is the future of our country, and I honestly believe Obama's economic plans are disastrous. I think his plan to pull the troops out of Iraq without adequate regard to the safety of that country is unethical. I think his words are big and his plans are small. I think he is a talker instead of a doer. And he has no real history of "crossing the aisle" and working on compromise. This "agent of change" that has so many people excited is going to be one more polarizing politician.

My money and my vote will go to the one candidate that actually does have a history of being different, a maverick, and agent of change, and an aisle crosser. John McCain.

In November if Obama loses to McCain I'm sure the U.S. will get all kinds of harassment and censure from Europeans on how we are backwards and unable to vote a black man into office. That, of course, will only show their own bias. Are we suppose to think about skin color or not??? But if McCain wins it will be because this country really is ready for change... a change from polarizing politics to real solutions.

More Wedding photos

2008-05-27T16:50:00.004-05:00

A few wedding pictures!

2008-05-26T18:28:00.004-05:00

If you click on the picture you will get a larger image. The two bridesmaids are my two younger daughters, and, of course, Will is walking Hannah down the aisle. I'll post more pictures soon!

The Wedding Weekend- Saturday Morning

2008-05-19T12:46:00.004-05:00

Our plan was to pick up the photographer (Olivia) at 8:30 Saturday morning, so I set the alarm for about 6:30. (The photographer is the daughter of a friend of mine who is apprenticing in photography.) I woke up before that, but felt so tired I couldn't drag myself out of bed right away. The morning's activities looked daunting to me, and I wanted to delay getting started! However, I finally did rouse myself to action, and after a cup of coffee, got the kids up. Hannah was already up after getting only 3 or 4 hours sleep. Will, Hannah, and I had all made "What To Take" lists and after each list had been consulted, we managed not to forget anything at home. I call that a miracle, especially considering we had all of the bride's stuff, the dresses, shoes, etc, for both bridesmaids (my other two daughters) and for myself, as well as make-up, hair stuff, bouquets, table decorations, rings, homemade candies, cupcake stands, and more. It all made it!

We picked up Olivia about 10 minutes late, and got to the restaurant a little later than planned, but no harm done. We dumped all the dresses and paraphernalia at a "sister" restaurant next door since we would all be dressing there, and took the rest of the wedding stuff on to The Red Room, where Hannah was getting married. The groom and groomsmen arrived in a timely fashion, as well as the flower girl and the pastor, Jimmy Chalmers. (Jimmy wrote a short piece about the wedding on his site yesterday.) They did a quick run-through of the wedding, and then we "girls" retired to get ready.

Hannah and the bridesmaids walked up the aisle to Pachalbel's Canon, and the whole wedding went off smoothly, even though the grooms ring was still sitting in a box next door at the other restaurant! The pastor, my daughter Rebekah, Hannah, and Erik all pulled off a convincing pantomime, and no one knew until afterwards that no ring was actually there for the ceremony! The service took 12 minutes. Afterwards, the guests talked outside in the beautiful weather while the chairs were removed and tables set up, and while photographs were taken.

Speaking of photographs, I honestly don't have any. Not one. We'll be getting some, of course, but over the whole weekend we did not personally take ONE photograph. I was too busy! I'll try to post some as I get them from friends and family (and photographer!).

We had a tight budget for this wedding, but it was intimate and beautiful none-the-less. the bride made all the floral decorations herself from silk flowers, including all the bouquets. She made her necklace and earrings for the wedding, as well as her sister's earrings. A good friend made hundreds of molded chocolate candies for the wedding as a present, which we placed in small bags around on the tables as eatable decorations. The bouquets were placed in glass vases filled with glass stones on a square of mirror for table centerpieces.

For a wedding "cake," we opted for cupcakes in decorative wire cupcake holders, and a small (8") round decorated cake for the bride and groom to cut. We had 4 dozen yellow cupcakes with white buttercream icing, and 4 dozen chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing. The cake was chocolate with a basket weave design in white buttercream. The cake "basket" was "filled" with decorative yellow icing roses on top. We taste tested cakes from several area store bakeries, but no "wedding" cake makers because of the cost. We picked a local food store called Lowe's Foods. The 8 dozen cupcakes and 8" cake together cost us about $70. The least expensive wedding cake we could find for 100 people was $300, most were close to $450.

What we did pay for was great food and great service at The Red Room. We payed for the party, and it was well worth the expense! In my opinion, the food was a much better place to put the money than fancy decorations or over-priced cakes.

The wedding started at 11:00 a.m. and the reception was over by 2:00 p.m. Later I'll make a short post about our fun-filled Saturday afternoon and evening with family.

The Wedding Weekend- Friday Evening

2008-05-18T20:25:00.003-05:00

The last week leading up to the wedding was exciting and tiring. On and off Tuesday and Wednesday I had a few min-panic attacks. I felt stressed with all there was to do, and all the unknowns surrounding the wedding details. By Thursday, however, I felt much calmer. There were still unknowns, and still lots to do, but I felt more excitement than stress. I kept checking things off my list and seeing it all come together. By mid-afternoon on Friday, the house was ready, the food was ready, and all the paraphernalia for the wedding had been gathered. Just in time for the out-of-town guests who started to arrive.

Most of my entire family arrived from out of town, coming from the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, and as far away as Oklahoma. Will's family came as well, from Virginia and Ohio. All together we had almost 30 people arriving Friday afternoon and evening ranging from 2 years old to mid-70's. I planned food that could stay out and be snacked on all evening, and had a cooler full of drinks on ice.

Friday evening was full of catching up between family members, and making new acquaintances between families. There was always some group telling stories and people laughing so hard they were gasping for breath. As hostess, I stayed busy and didn't have as much time to just sit as I might wish, but it was fun to be an "observer" of this wonderful group of people. I was struck again by how blessed I am to be surrounded by such loving and open people as my family and Will's family. How can anyone be so doubly-blessed?

Erik and his two close friends (and future groomsmen) from Oregon stopped by for a while, and then went off again to see Iron Man and try not to stress over the wedding.

All the guests had headed to their hotel rooms by 10:00 pm or so, and Will and I cleaned up some before getting everything organized for the morning. Then we all went to bed, except Hannah, who I think got very little sleep!

Rant against DirecTV

2008-05-09T13:42:00.001-05:00

I will make this as short as possible.

In late March we signed up to switch from cable tv, cable internet, and digital phone to Verizon phone (land line), Verizon DSL, and DirecTV. The monthly savings were significant (>$65 a month). We knew the internet would be somewhat slower, but that seemed okay.

It's been a nightmare.

First the internet connection crawled. We weren't getting the 1.5 Mb promised. In fact, at one point we were getting less than a third of that. Will finally got that fixed (hour-long service call later, after I'd already spent an hour earlier in the week). (Head's up: 1.5 Mb isn't fast enough for 8 computers, especially when you have several teens downloading games and videos.)

But the frustration over slow internet is nothing compared to what we've been through with DirecTV.

Short version:
April 8th- satellite installed, good signal. Signed the contract.
April 20th (or there about)- signal starts breaking up....losing channels.
May 1st (or there about)- no signal on any local channel. Almost all channels have deficient quality and pixilation problems.
May 9th- Technician comes out and says we have "no line of sight" since the leaves have come out on the trees. (Are you getting this??) He may be able to get a line of sight if we agree to put it right smack on the front of our house, but he can't promise how long that will last since the signal would barely be making it over the tops of two sweet gums in our back yard. If they grow any, the signal would be lost. Plus, it would be on the FRONT of my house.
May 9th- a few minutes after the tech left- called DirecTV with this information, asking to cancel service since we have no lone of sight. But guess what? If we "break" the contract we signed, we have to pay them $480. Even if their technician is the one who screwed up and placed the satellite pointing through bare trees that got their leaves two weeks later. Since there was a line of sight when the dish was installed, the contract is valid. We lose $480.

Keeping the dish is no option, since we aren't getting service. We'd do better with an antennae.

I am ashamed to admit I totally lost it with the service rep on the phone. I was screaming at him. He hung up on me.(He was being an arrogant jerk, but.....) I called back and talked more calmly to another rep. She said she'd "appeal" the action with the "back office." We should hear in about two weeks what they decide.

I call it fraud. BTW- the tech that was here today said he's going on all kinds of calls in the past few weeks moving dishes for people who had their dishes installed in the winter when there were no trees. If your are out of warranty, the service call is $80. DirecTV is making money by duping ignorant customers.

I'll be back after the wedding!

2008-05-08T17:39:00.003-05:00

I probably won't get around to Part 3 of Dog-paddling Across the Tiber until sometime after the 17th. It's not so much that I don't have time to type, but I don't have time to think.

The week after the wedding should be a quiet one. I'll plan, Lord willing, to continue then.

Dog-paddling across the Tiber Pt 2

2008-05-01T20:07:00.002-05:00

About the time I started reading all about Catholicism from a Protestant point of view, my family left the very reformed church we'd been attending. The church had sapped all our joy (this had something to do with the leadership, not just the doctrines), and we felt in need of healing. We started attending a local PCA church where we knew the pastor. He is a wonderful man who preaches a great sermon, but my family didn't seem to fit into the church. It was as much us as anything, I know, but we couldn't quite make it work. Out of 400-500 people, we were only one of four or five families to home school. Also, with five children, we were the largest family in the church.

About a year later, my oldest daughter wanted to go to a youth group at a non-denominational church called Grace Church. We had friends there, and my daughter knew at least 6 other teens going to the youth group. She didn't know any at the PCA church we were attending. The new youth group was a large, active one, pulling youth from several churches around the area, some too small to have their own groups. It had a nice balance of public, private, and home schooled teens.

One Sunday Will and I brought the family to Grace, mostly to see who was influencing our daughter and to let them know we were around and involved. The service was primarily divided into worship time (lots of singing) and sermon time, with communion in between. It was very different from the Presbyterian services we were used to, and that's probably one reason it appealed so much. We continued attending Grace Church after that, and, as a family, we're still there.

But I wasn't being idle in my research of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Some of the books I read about this time include:

Roman Catholicism: Evangelical Protestants Analyze What Divides and Unites Us

Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on "Romanism" by "Bible Christians" by Karl Keating (The book that mainly prompted the email to John Holtzman. Keating is not a winsome writer.)

Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy , At the Corner of East and Now, and The Illuminated Heart, all by Frederica Mathewes-Green.

I also read parts of Common Ground: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity for the American Christian by Jordan Bajis and a short biography of Pope John Paul II. Will read The Evidential Power of Beauty by Dubay, and we both read books on church history. But mainly I read articles and books by Protestants about what was wrong with Catholic (and EO) beliefs.

Next I'll talk about how the faith journey of a friend challenged me to give Catholicism an honest look.

Is Wright looking for "revenge"?

2008-04-30T07:24:00.001-05:00

This Op-Ed was in the NYTimes today.
April 29, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Pastor Casts a Shadow
By BOB HERBERT

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.

Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away. He’s found himself a national platform, and he’s loving it.

It’s a twofer. Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived.

So there he was lecturing an audience at the National Press Club about everything from the black slave experience to the differences in sentencing for possession of crack and powdered cocaine.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency.

On Sunday night, in an appearance before the Detroit N.A.A.C.P., Mr. Wright mocked the regional dialects of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. I’m not sure how he felt that was helpful in his supposed quest to bring about a constructive discussion about race and reconciliation in the U.S.

What he is succeeding in doing is diminishing the stature of Senator Obama. A candidate who stands haplessly by as his former spiritual guide roams the country dropping one divisive bomb after another is in very little danger of being seen by most voters as the next J.F.K. or L.B.J.

The thing to keep in mind about Rev. Wright is that he is a smart fellow. He’s been a very savvy operator, politically and otherwise, for decades. He has built a thriving, politically connected congregation on the South Side of Chicago that has done some very good work over the years. Powerful people have turned to him for guidance and advice.

So it’s not like he’s naïve politically. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Forget the gibberish about responding to attacks on the black church. That is not what the reverend’s appearance before the press club was about. He was responding to what he perceives as an attack on him.

This whole story is about Senator Obama’s run for the White House and absolutely nothing else. Barack Obama went to Rev. Wright’s church as a young man and was blessed with the Christian bona fides that would be absolutely essential for a high-profile political career.

Faster than anyone could have imagined, the young Mr. Obama became Senator Obama and then the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then came the videotaped sermons and the roof caved in on Rev. Wright’s reputation. Senator Obama had no choice but to distance himself, and he did it as gently as he felt he could.

My guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to his former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.

For Senator Obama, the re-emergence of Rev. Wright has been devastating. The senator has been trying desperately to bolster his standing with skeptical and even hostile white working-class voters. When the story line of the campaign shifts almost entirely to the race-in-your-face antics of someone like Mr. Wright, Mr. Obama’s chances can only suffer.

Beyond that, the apparent helplessness of the Obama campaign in the face of the Wright onslaught contributes to the growing perception of the candidate as weak, as someone who is unwilling or unable to fight aggressively on his own behalf.

Hillary Clinton is taunting Mr. Obama about his unwillingness to participate in another debate. Rev. Wright is roaming the country with the press corps in tow, happily promoting the one issue Mr. Obama had tried to avoid: race.

Mr. Obama seems more and more like someone buffeted by events, rather than in charge of them. Very little has changed in the superdelegate count, but a number of those delegates have expressed concern in private over Mr. Obama’s inability to do better among white working-class voters and Catholics.

Rev. Wright is absolutely the wrong medicine for those concerns.

Dog-paddling across the Tiber Pt 1

2008-04-28T21:38:00.003-05:00

This is probably a lousy time to start blogging on my journey toward the Catholic church, with a wedding looming on the horizon and all. But, as with many things in my life, I'll do it even though it doesn't make sense. Please forgive me if I disappear around mid-May.

Part of the reason I want to write about it now is to help me think again about the whole process. I admit to some cold-feet, some hesitation. And yet...I can't see myself not taking this step. It is not only the next natural step to take, but it's the one that I want. But this isn't an easy decision. If it was easy, I might actually be more wary of making it, wondering what I was missing in the big picture. At this point in my journey, however, I do see the "warts and all" of the decision, and choose to make it anyway.

I don't have the best memory, so I won't get all the pieces of this puzzle right. I'm sure I'll leave something out (lots of somethings, actually), and get some chronology wring. But I'm sure of the beginning, so I'll simply start there. The whole thing started with homeschooling my children, and my oldest daughter in particular. For her 10th grade year she and I studied Church History using Sonlight's curriculum, and rest, as they say, is not only history, but it is my present and future.

We were pretty dyed in the wool Calvinists at this time, attending a church that practiced the Regulative Principle (anything not explicitly commanded in worship is forbidden). I might add, that the year of study, which included a study of the Westminster Confession, did nothing to shake my daughter's faith or her beliefs. For me it was the beginnings of an earthquake, one slowing forming cracks along fault lines I didn't even know existed in my faith and beliefs.

That year had me reading books on Eastern Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and more. The books, and the questions in the study guide, led to some honest wrestling with beliefs I'd always accepted at face value. What did the early church really look like, where did we get the Bible, and could there be some solid basis for the "different" doctrines of the EO or RC churches? I saw for the first time the sweep of history, the early origins of beliefs and practices I had been taught were late additions of a corrupted church. I was so angry I wrote a long, complaining email to John Holtzman, the author and publisher of Sonlight curriculum. (It says something about the small size of the company that in those days Holtzman freely corresponded with many users.) John and I carried on an intermittent conversation about what was "safe" and proper for good Protestant kids to be reading and learning. (Even with my own hesitations, I never stopped my daughter from reading any of the books or delving into the questions. Like I said, she wasn't struggling with the new information, I was.) One thing I appreciated about the Sonlight curriculum is it never let you get off easy. There were few pat answers on any level, and difficult books and information were never withheld simply because they were difficult. Holtzman stood by his choice of books and questions. We need to believe because we believe, not because we only know one side of the story.

That study of church history sent me scurrying to find reassurance in my Protestant, and particularly reformed, belief system. Over the next few years I read all kinds of books on understanding Catholicism, but only those written by Protestants.

About those superdelegates

2008-04-20T15:55:00.005-05:00

I'm not the most savvy voter in the world, I'll admit, but I don't think I'd ever heard much, if anything, about superdelegates before this winter. I didn't always vote republican, either. In fact, I was a teenage campaigner for McGovern in 1972, even before I could vote. At any rate, I'd never heard enough about superdelegates for them to get much under my attention radar. They are now.

Would someone like to explain the concept to me? Where did it come from, and why does it still exist? It amuses me that many people who would like to get away from the electoral college are members the party that has the superdelegate system. Can anyone spell "ironic"?

Here is a little piece of news from today about superdelegates: the undecided ones, currently numbering approximately 250, don't feel bound by the primary votes, or the number of delegate a candidate already has.

About 250 superdelegates have told the AP they are undecided or uncommitted. About 60 more will be selected at state party conventions and meetings this spring.

AP reporters across the nation contacted the undecideds and asked them how they plan to choose. Of those, 117 agreed to discuss the decision-making process.

_About a third said the most important factor will be the candidate who, they believe, has the best chance of beating Republican John McCain in the general election.

_One in 10 said the biggest factor will be the candidate with the most pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses.

_One in 10 said what matters most is who won their state or congressional district in the primary or caucus.

_The rest cited multiple factors or parochial issues.

And this quote amazes me:

Many of the undecided superdelegates say they don't want to be perceived as elite insiders, cutting backroom deals to select a nominee. But that doesn't mean they're ready to forfeit their status.

"The way the system is set up, the superdelegates are able to weigh in because we are the most experienced people in the party," said Blake Johnson, an undecided superdelegate from Alaska. "We are the ones who have been part of the party the longest and keep it running on a day-to-day basis."

Can anyone spell "clueless"?

I'll make you a little wager. If Clinton gets the nomination based on superdelegate votes, we'll see an outcry to change the system before the next election cycle. If Obama wins the nomination the superdelegate debate probably won't get much attention.

Well, I'm still here...

2008-04-17T12:22:00.004-05:00

It seems I can post and everything. The Road Runner account was turned off last Saturday, but Blogger seems to think that's just fine. I have to sign out of my new Blogger account and sign into this one in order to post or respond to comments, but that's okay.

Not that I have much to say these days. Actually, I have a lot to say but I never seem to have the energy to articulate it. Like, I am still wondering about the validity of "super delegates" in the Democratic primary process. What part of "let the people decide" did the Democrats miss? If the super delegates are suppose to vote the "will of the people" why have them? If they are there to make the final decision, why have the primaries?

Not so sure about "winner take all" of the Republican primaries, either.

There are other things on my mind. I'm still getting ready for a May 17th wedding and trying not to stress. I'm concerned about the future financial stability of my daughter and new husband, as well as the future anything for my 19 yr old son. Well, he's got a real nice girlfriend. I'm working towards joining the Catholic church in July. That's a biggie.

It seems like every conversation these days turns to how to live out your faith...really live your faith, as in get your hands dirty, sacrifice your time and energy, and stop thinking just sending a check's gonna do it. I'm still trying to stand unnoticed in a corner so no one picks me for any of those jobs. Sorry God, but I'm feeling paralyzed right now. Even thinking about what and where I could help gives me an anxiety attack. Don't know why. But I'm putting off figuring out until after the wedding.

And there's more. I'm thinking all the time. Worrying more than I should. Having long monologues in my head about this and that, and never having the energy to write them down.

But I'm here. I'm reading other people's blogs. And I'm thinking and wishing something good and relevant and insightful would pop into my head so I'd have something interesting to post. Until then, expect more cat pictures.

More computer trouble!

2008-04-11T12:57:00.000-05:00

see more crazy cat pics

A "just in case" solution...

2008-04-08T18:59:00.002-05:00

I just started a new blog in case I can't keep posting to this one.

Copy this url:
http://eclectic-experiment2.blogspot.com/

and keep it until I know for sure this blog is going to stay up. If I disappear, you'll know where to find me!

Carrie

Blog future unknown....

2008-04-08T10:58:00.002-05:00

For the handful of faithful friends who read my blog: I wanted you to know I'm not sure what the future holds for this particular blog. I've changed my email address, and it seems that this blog is inextricably linked to the old address. I can't keep the old address because that, in turn, is inextricably linked to road runner, which we are discontinuing. I've managed to change my email address on my profile, but not the "username" which is the old address. Confused??

What I'm hoping will happen is Blogger won't notice that the old addy isn't functional anymore. I'll have to use it to log in, but other than that all updates and notifications ought to go to my new address. That's the plan, anyway. If that doesn't work, I might just fade gracefully into the sunset.

Carrie

Our Advanced Drama class made this video...

2008-04-04T14:30:00.004-05:00

So Long Self

The Advanced Drama team at our home school tutorial made this music video to Mercy Me's So Long Self. I think they did a good job.

Carrie

My theme song

2008-03-20T21:31:00.003-05:00

With the spiritual turmoil of the last couple of years, I find this simple song expresses where my heart is.

Jerusalem, My Destiny
I have set my eyes on your hills,
Jerusalem, my Destiny.
Though I cannot see the end for me
I cannot turn away.

We have set our hearts for the way;
This journey is our destiny.
Let no one walk alone.
This journey makes us one.

For a grin...

2008-03-18T11:26:00.001-05:00

see more crazy cat pics

How McCain needs to campaign against Obama

2008-03-05T19:38:00.004-05:00

If Obama is the Democratic candidate, there is, imo, only one way to win against him. No, it won't be to go negative as Hillary has. Maybe that will work for her, who knows, but it won't work for McCain. I think a negative campaign by a Republican against the mild-mannered Obama will be a disaster.

And McCain doesn't need to harp too long on the experience factor. Everyone knows how long McCain's been around and how long Obama hasn't. People aren't too sure long experience in Washington is such a great asset, anyway. One of the things McCain has going for him is that he's been a maverick; he's been different. Harping on Obama's lack of experience may end up hurting McCain in the long run, since he needs to look "fresh" and different than the present administration. So a few reminders of experience should do the trick there.

What McCain needs to do is tackle the issues. Over, and over, and over again. Simply line up the issues and show where they differ and how he (McCain) is going to achieve his goals. The reason this could work is simple. When all the dust has settled and the stirring oratories are getting less fresh and effective, people are going to realize Obama is simply a very liberal democrat of the old school.

I once thought Obama was a lightweight on substance. I've read through pages and pages on his website and now know he has very definite ideas about the changes he wants to see. (He's still weak on details, especially how you pay for all this stuff, but he's got definite goals at any rate.) The problem, at least for those of us on the conservative side of the spectrum, is that he holds the same agenda as every liberal for the past 40 years. The failed policies of Carter. The "government as nanny" policies of Clinton et al, and the liberal social agenda of Ted Kennedy. All rolled into one.

In the end, many Republicans who have been sickened by the present administration may very well wake up to the fact that replacing one political extreme with the opposite isn't going to change things the way they hope. Things will still be hopelessly deadlocked and polarizing politics will continue to reign. I think some eyes will open to the facts of national security, immigration, our moral duty in Iraq, the idiocy of turning health care over to the government, and all the other issues that Republicans tend to feel strongly about. People are going to take another look at McCain. Yes, the Bush administration has screwed things up royally, but what we need is a concerted effort to come together in the middle.

So McCain needs to show America exactly what Obama is. A nice, well-spoken, passionate, and very liberal, Democrat. Nothing more, nothing less. Not the "enemy," not evil, not anything except wrong on where this country needs to go. We don't need to go off the cliff on the other side. We need to find common ground. I believe McCain has the potential to do just that, in fact has already proven he can. With someone in the White house willing to work on both sides of the aisle, maybe we can truly get something done on these issues.

I hope Republican, and independents and moderate Democrats as well, can see the need for a moderate in the White House and give McCain a chance. And I hope McCain can see that his best bet to get there is to simply lay the facts out and let the people decide.

And even if McCain doesn't win, America will benefit greatly from a campaign run on the issues instead of negative emotions.

The role of government

2008-03-02T17:48:00.002-05:00

This election year has caused me to ponder a lot of questions about the true role of government in our daily lives, as well as their role in national and international affairs. Here are random questions and thoughts, which may or may not make sense.

* Ours is a democratically elected government of a pluralistic society. That means, in part, that no one part of society gets special treatment.

* So what role should that government play in things such as protection of one segment of society from abuse of another? Obviously, we've decided no one should discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or sex. Who decides what constitutes "abuse" of one party by another?

* Can it be argued that the government's job is to see to the welfare of the country? At all costs? At some cost? In other words, can't it be argued that if it is in the country's best interest to protect it's oil supply, it should do so?

* Who decides what's in the county's best interest? The voters? A 51% majority? The courts?

This is what is stumping me, but I'm not able to articulate it well. I've been reading how the government shouldn't legislate "morality." You can't force people to make what other people think are the "right" or moral choices in life. Abortion, homosexual rights, and stem cell research are just a few examples. But at the same time, social justice issues are seen as the proper domain for the federal government. Welfare, food stamps, child care, health care, education, head start, etc. We've tried affirmative action as well as other social programs to level the playing field. Isn't that legislating morality, too?

Is the job of government to ensure their international trading is "fair" trade? If we say it is in the best interest of any country to deal compassionately with other countries and peoples, aren't we making moral judgments and therefore asking our governments to legislate morality instead of ensure the safety and survival of the country? What about illegal immigration? Should we possibly weaken our defenses and drain our resources by dealing "compassionately" with those who have come here to seek a better life? Perhaps immigrants are making the country a better place, but I think it can be argued rather effectively that that's not a universal truth and there are real and costly problems involved. Should compassion for an individual (or even many individuals) dictate national policy? Should it dictate how everyone must deal with something like this on a national level? Isn't it best to accommodate the needs of the many, not the few? Isn't that legislating morality?

It just seems we want to pick and choose what we see as the legitimate moral grounds for the federal government. Most, if not all of you who read my sporadic blog should know me at least a little. Yes, I have a conservative bent in politics and social issues. But I'm letting my mind run here, and I want help thinking through this issue of what is the legitimate role of government and who has the right to chose which areas the government meddles in, and which it doesn't?

Here is a concrete example. Should a government be compassionate at all costs? Isn't it the federal governments' primary job to secure our borders and to keep our country safe? If you don't see that as a primary function, what do you think the primary function is?

Our Moral Duty in Iraq

2008-02-20T10:45:00.002-05:00

This article is bang-on, in my opinion. From America: The National Catholic Weekly

Our Moral Duty in Iraq
How would U.S. withdrawal affect the Iraqi people?
By Gerard F. Powers | FEBRUARY 18, 2008

Last year 14 Catholic Democrats sent a letter about Iraq to the U.S. Catholic bishops. After citing church leaders’ just war arguments against the original intervention, Tim Ryan, Rosa DeLauro, Marcy Kaptur and their colleagues concluded that it is time “to seek an end to this injustice.” They urged the bishops to support their efforts to force a withdrawal of U.S. troops as a way to “bring an end to this war.”

If it was immoral to intervene in Iraq in the first place, is it immoral to stay? Even Hillary Clinton, who supported the intervention, has claimed that Barack Obama is inconsistent because he opposed the intervention but later supported funding for U.S. troops to remain. Clearly, the ethics of intervention and the ethics of exit are related. The widespread, and correct, belief that the original intervention was illegitimate, the lack of broad international support and the failure to tie the toppling of a brutal regime in Iraq to a realistic and clear post-intervention plan have contributed to the debacle there. That said, as Bishop William Skylstad, then president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, emphasized in November, the focus now should be “more on the ethics of exit than on the ethics of intervention,” for the two, while related, are distinct. A just war can lead to an unjust peace; less often, an unjust war can lead to a just peace. Today’s challenge in Iraq is to ensure that an unjust war does not lead to an unjust peace.

Many in the antiwar camp fail to acknowledge that the United States bears a moral burden to help Iraqis build a just peace, a burden made heavier precisely because the war is unjust. As an uninvited occupying power, the United States has assumed a whole set of moral obligations to promote the common good of the Iraqi people until Iraqis can take control of their own affairs.

Legally, the United States is no longer occupying Iraq, but by almost any measure Iraq is a failed state. Morally, therefore, the United States retains significant residual responsibilities to Iraqis. The Iraq intervention may have been an optional, immoral war; but given the U.S. government’s shared responsibility for the ensuing crisis, its continued engagement is not an optional moral commitment.
What Matters Morally?

Others calling for U.S. withdrawal acknowledge the ethics of exit, but give too much weight to an ethic of efficacy (Is U.S. intervention working?) over an ethic of responsibility (What do we owe Iraqis?).

Boston College School of Theology & Ministry: An int'l theological center preparing leaders for the church in the 21st century.

Efficacy must be part of any moral analysis of Iraq. At a forum sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, the ethicist Michael Walzer, a vocal opponent of the Iraq intervention, argued that “we are consequentialists for the moment. Neither staying on nor leaving Iraq is a categorical imperative” (see http://kroc.nd.edu/events/07fordhamevent.shtml).

Unlike many in the debate, Walzer is clear about the breadth of moral obligations that exist in Iraq and thus the range of consequences that matter morally. According to Walzer, “We have to figure out a strategy that produces the least bad results for the Iraqi people, for other people in the Middle East, and for American soldiers.”

Arguments for withdrawal tend to give most weight to what is good for U.S. soldiers (and, I would add, U.S. interests). It would be morally irresponsible not to take into account legitimate U.S. interests, not least our moral obligations to the small percentage of Americans who are helping to shoulder the burden in Iraq, and the moral costs of spending more than $2 billion per week on the war while other pressing needs go unmet.

Moral clarity about what we owe ourselves is often not matched by moral clarity about what we owe Iraqis. The Catholic Democrats and presidential candidates who rally antiwar support by equating a withdrawal of U.S. troops with “ending the war” in Iraq define the “ought” mostly without reference to the Iraqi people. Proposals to de-authorize and stop funding the war and to set strict timetables for redeployment might “end the war” for Americans. But would they end the war between Sunnis and Shiites? Would they end the insurgency, the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks or the widespread criminality in Iraq?

The moral question, then, is not the one put by Senator John Warner to Gen. David Petraeus: What policies and strategies will best serve U.S. national security interests? Rather, it is: What policies and strategies will best serve the interests and well-being of the Iraqi people?
What the United States Owes the Iraqis

When U.S. obligations to Iraqis are taken into account, they are often defined in a minimalist way, such as: combatting terrorist groups in Iraq; training and equipping Iraqi security forces; providing reconstruction assistance; pressing Iraqis to meet benchmarks for political “reconciliation”; taking in more Iraqi refugees, including those who have supported U.S. efforts; protecting the Kurds; and deterring Iranian aggression or regional instability. These are legitimate goals, but they do not seem commensurate with the magnitude of the needs of the Iraqi people, especially for security.

Despite the fact that ensuring order is the primary responsibility of an occupying power, the Bush administration did not make protecting Iraqi civilians a priority until the “surge.” The leading Democratic presidential candidates are clear that protecting civilians is not a U.S. obligation, despite abundant evidence that Iraqi security forces cannot do it alone. The inadequacy of such minimalist goals is clearer when tied to early deadlines for withdrawal. Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, argues that such deadlines would force Iraqis “to look into the abyss” of a civil war. Would proponents of this high stakes game of chicken be so confident of its efficacy or be so willing to impose the burden of moral risk on a long-victimized Iraqi people if their calculations began with a more robust understanding of U.S. ethical responsibilities to Iraqis?

Despite the obvious difficulties involved, the original U.S. objectives of building an Iraq that is “peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure” are closer to what the United States owes Iraqis than are the minimalist alternatives. I would state the U.S. responsibilities more robustly than the Democratic presidential candidates have outlined or the Bush administration has pursued in practice. There are four: (1) not to end all political violence, but to ensure that an Iraqi government can maintain a reasonable degree of security for the whole country and minimize the threat of chaos or civil war; (2) not to impose a Western-style democracy, but to facilitate establishment of a stable, fairly representative government that respects basic human rights, especially minority rights; (3) not to promote a U.S.-style capitalist economy, but to restore Iraq’s infrastructure and a viable economy that serves Iraqi needs, not U.S. interests, especially not U.S. oil interests; and (4) not to stay without the consent of a legitimate Iraqi government, or, lacking that, the United Nations.

Even if one accepts this understanding of U.S. obligations, isn’t there a time when our obligations expire? Last October, a House resolution concluded that, “after more than four years of valiant efforts by members of the Armed Forces and United States civilians, the Government of Iraq must now be responsible for Iraq’s future course.” Such a short timetable seems less the product of a sober assessment of what it takes to succeed in the daunting nation-building project the United States has undertaken, and more a reflection of the lack of patience and long-term commitment to deal with the aftermath of interventions that is often evident in U.S. foreign policy. Had there been a realistic plan in Iraq, would it be reasonable to expect a stable, united Iraq with an agreed constitution, a revived economy and a respected and effective government that could survive on its own—all that in five years? The fact that Iraq is a mostly failed state wracked by violence is not an argument for withdrawal, but evidence of just how far the United States is from meeting its moral responsibilities.

After almost five years of multiple U.S. missteps, misdeeds and miscalculations, serious doubts arise about whether the United States has the capacity, the competence, the moral credibility or the confidence of the Iraqi people needed to do a better job. The United States has seriously failed Iraq; but past failure need not beget future failure, nor does it absolve us of our obligations. Given what is at stake, the Bush administration (and its successor) must do more to put Iraqi interests first, to commit the necessary resources (especially for protection of Iraqi civilians and for reconstruction), to engage Iraq’s neighbors and the international community, and to pursue new approaches that offer a better chance of meeting U.S. obligations. Those calling for an “end to the war” also have a heavy burden. They must show that, despite the U.S. obligations and the risks associated with failing to fulfill them, there is nothing more that can be done.
Has the Burden Been Met?

Many believe that the burden has been met. How can the United States continue to be held responsible, antiwar advocates ask, when Iraqis remain mired in sectarian conflicts born of ancient hatreds? Iraqis ultimately are responsible for resolving their deep divisions. The United States, however, is hardly a disinterested humanitarian entity, offering what Fouad Ajami has called the “foreigner’s gift” of freedom. Instead, the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran and during Saddam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds. The United States devastated Iraq during the 1991 war and the ensuing embargo, overthrew its government in 2003 and displayed gross negligence and incompetence in dealing with the aftermath. The U.S. role in Iraq might not be “ancient,” but it is a part of the “hatreds” there.

Decoupling the United States from Iraq’s hatreds is a complex matter. A precipitous U.S. withdrawal could end the war for the United States, but only for a while. Many analysts warn that a spiral of violence that could fill a vacuum left by an ill-timed U.S. withdrawal might necessitate a reintervention by the United States on humanitarian and security grounds. If the United States were not already in Iraq, there would be a clamor for humanitarian intervention to end the strife, which the World Health Organization estimates killed 151,000 Iraqis between 2003 and June 2006. One cannot criticize the United States and the international community for not intervening to stop the sectarian strife in Darfur, while insisting that disengagement is the appropriate response to sectarian strife in Iraq (strife which, unlike Darfur, is both a direct and indirect result of U.S. actions).
The Best Antiwar Argument

Paradoxically, a failure to take seriously the distinction between the ethics of intervention and the ethics of exit, and to give an ethic of responsibility proper weight in the moral analysis, could undermine the original moral case against the war. The legitimate desire to end U.S. military engagement in a costly war with no end in sight has led many antiwar advocates to embrace a type of moral reasoning that is all too similar to that which they rejected when it was used by the Bush administration to justify the war. The Bush administration discarded traditional just war norms and launched a preventive war on the grounds that it was necessary to protect U.S. interests. Opponents of continued U.S. involvement must be careful not to discard norms governing U.S. responsibilities to the Iraqi people on the grounds that U.S. withdrawal is necessary to protect U.S. interests.

The Bush administration’s case was based on best-case scenarios: a preventive war would prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, and Iraq would quickly become a model democracy in the Middle East. Opponents countered that war in the world’s most volatile region would unleash the kind of uncontrollable, unintended consequences that have, in fact, ensued. If such realistic assessments of the risks of negative consequences were a reason for opposing the original intervention, they should also be a reason for opposing too rapid a withdrawal. Hopes that things could not get worse in Iraq might be tragically misplaced and deadlines might backfire. Reliance on best-case scenarios got us into our current predicament; it is not a strategy for getting us out of it.

The strongest argument against the Iraq intervention was that preventive wars are wars of aggression, which often become wars of occupation. And wars of occupation often degenerate into wars of repression, as the occupier resorts to indiscriminate and disproportionate force, emergency measures (even torture) and other heavy-handed tactics to pacify a resistant population. Wars of occupation, moreover, invariably involve a sustained, extremely difficult, long-term commitment to nation building that is at odds with U.S. political culture. Holding the Bush administration to this high standard of moral responsibility—rather than suggesting that responsibilities to Iraqis can easily be overridden by U.S. interests and by calculations of necessity and efficacy—would help hold the line on preventive war in the future.

Given the fears generated by terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, such preventive wars will remain all too tempting and all too easy for the United States, if it is not required to bear the burden of what it has wrought.

The best antiwar argument must address two moral failures in Iraq, not just one: it was immoral to intervene; in the ensuing nation-building process, the United States has failed the Iraqi people by willing an end (a peaceful and prosperous Iraq) without willing the means to achieve it.

A preoccupation with what is good for U.S. troops and U.S. interests, coupled with speculative, short-term assessments of success and necessity, could compound this double moral failure. Those who say that it is too late and too costly to fix what we have broken must not forget what we owe Iraqis, lest they too readily impose on Iraqis alone the risks of a serious humanitarian, security and political crisis if the U.S. withdraws too soon. The antiwar position must find a better balance between an ethics of efficacy and an ethics of responsibility, between meeting U.S. needs and interests and Iraqi needs and interests. Some might still conclude that strict deadlines for withdrawal are called for. I doubt it. But at least then withdrawal would be pursued, not with self-righteous calls to “end” an immoral war, but with a deep sense of anguish, remorse and foreboding over our nation’s failure to live up to its obligations to the Iraqi people.

The moral question is: What policies and strategies best serve the interests of the Iraqi people?

Gerard F. Powers, director of policy studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, is a former director of the Office of International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Obama- let's all get a grip here

2008-02-12T14:14:00.000-05:00

From this week's The Week magazine

Obama: Is he the second coming of JFK?

“The arc of Barack Obama’s rise has passed through three distinct phases,” said Shailagh Murray in The Washington Post. First he was the intriguing newcomer. Then he was a serious challenger. As he continues to battle
Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, inspiring crowds and preaching the politics of hope, Obama has entered phase three, with some Democrats proclaiming him as the spiritual successor to one of the Democratic Party’s greatest heroes—John F. Kennedy. Like JFK, said Eileen McNamara in The Boston Globe, Obama “was a relative unknown only four years before he boldly sought the presidency.” Like JFK, he’s got youth, vigor, and eloquence. His endorsement by two of the country’s most famous
Kennedys last week cemented the comparison. “There was a time when another young candidate was running for president and challenged America to cross a new frontier,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy. JFK’s daughter, Caroline, declared, “We need a change in the leadership of this country—just as we did in 1960.”

Oh, please, said Sean Wilentz in the Los Angeles Times. Sure, Obama has JFK’s optimism and charisma. But in terms of credentials, there’s no comparison. “By the time JFK ran for president, he had served three terms in the House and twice won election to the Senate.” A decorated World War II veteran, he closely studied foreign affairs, and served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s eight years in the Illinois legislature and uncompleted single Senate term can’t hold a candle to that record. His lack of experience calls to mind what another great Democrat, Harry Truman, advised JFK when he ran in 1960: “May I urge you to be patient?”

Kennedy didn’t heed that advice, said David Brooks in The New York Times, and neither should Obama. Another Clinton presidency would only plunge us back into the political bitterness that began with the culture wars of the late 1960s. Obama, on the other hand, promises a return to the nonpartisan idealism of Kennedy’s New Frontier. He’s calling America to take “the high road,” to transcend differences, to embrace service instead of selfishness. At times, said Evan Thomas in Newsweek, Obama does have an almost
eerie ability to channel JFK with speeches that “make audiences weep with longing and nostalgia” for a less cynical age.

As an Obama volunteer myself, said Robert Baird in the Chicago Tribune, I find this generational nostalgia more creepy than moving. Kennedy was elected nearly a half-century ago, and the youngest people to have voted for him are now 68. Marketing Obama as the candidate of the future by linking him to the past is more than a little ironic. Besides, being likened to JFK isn’t necessarily flattering, said Froma Harrop in The Providence Journal. Kennedy was, at best, a very flawed president, given to reckless behavior and mistakes borne of inexperience and youthful arrogance. “The more we learn about his Camelot, the less perfect it sounds.”

Still, the media really loves the idea of Obama as the second coming of JFK, said Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. Chalk that up to a serious case of “Kennedy envy.” Today’s young journalists know that the country was in thrall to JFK’s charisma and his wit, and they’re thrilled at the idea of covering an Obama presidency. Those same reporters and pundits, on the other hand, are thoroughly sick of the Clintons. Let’s all please remember that this election, like all elections, is about the future, not the past, said Ellen Goodman in The Boston Globe. “It’s not about who will be the next Kennedy, but rather the next president.”

The Recycling Myth- a Swede reveals the other side

2008-02-07T22:02:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting read:
The Recycling Myth

I love reading the "other" side of the "accepted wisdom." Not that I'm against recycling, but I like to see issues discussed completely.

If your interested, you can google the results of a new European study that says biofuels are a losing proposition. Duh!

Tiger by the tail!

2008-02-05T20:21:00.000-05:00

Wedding bells are in the air and that means I'm up to my eyeballs with fittings, decisions, flowers, caterers, swatches, decisions, cake, photographer, hotel reservations, and did I say, decisions?

My daughter and her fiancee set the wedding date (May 17th) early in the fall, but she went into denial mode and didn't do much of any planning until after Christmas. The only thing we had settled was who was performing the ceremony. (Hi Jimmy!)

Last week we finally settled on a place (don't wait until the last minute for this one...not many options left), a caterer (God bless him, he was the one who found us a venue), the DRESS (major time expenditure for that decision), the mother-of-the-bride's dress, the bridesmaids' dresses, and the photographer. We still need to actually decide on the menu for the reception, the seating arrangement (it will be tricky, the place is small), and a cake. Our to-do list includes getting reservations for several out-of-town guests, the wedding bands, printing the invitations, getting all the addresses, sending the invitations, buying the flowers and making the bouquets and flower arrangements, deciding on who is making the cake and what kind of cake, among others.

What else is on my plate? We need to buy a used car for the boys to use. We have the funds now, we just need the time to search one out and test drive. I have to decide on the new biology text for the homeschool tutorial before May. Then, once the wedding is past, I need to prepare lesson plans for at least the fall semester. We're also making plans to do some structural changes on the house to accommodate the newlyweds if they need to stay while Erik goes to school. We hope to do some of the work ourselves, if possible, but will need to get someone for some of the work, and to advise us. Plus, I really want to have the house looking nice and the yard planted with flowers before the wedding since there will be lots of people in and out that weekend.

In the meantime I'm still driving my kids all over the place, trying to homeschool two, and teaching one class on Fridays. In other words, none of my regular jobs have stopped or lessened.

But weddings are good things, and honestly, I'm getting so excited! My oldest daughter is getting married, and my younger daughters are the bridesmaids. How can a mom not be bursting with pride?

Crazy for God

2008-01-24T14:07:00.001-05:00

Today I finished Frank Schaeffer's book about growing up in the shadow of his famous parents. As I've read the book, it stirred-up many emotions and conflicts. One part of me was saddened by the revelations of the "feet of clay" both Francis and Edith Schaeffer hid so well from public view. Part of me cringed at Frank's, well, frankness, about his life, including more details about his sex life than I really cared to know. Another part was shocked by the revelations Frank made about the evangelical rise to power in the U.S., and the role he and his father played in it. Part of me was nodding my head and wondering how so many Christians in this country came to be so completely duped by the power-hungry, exclusivist, narrow-minded, greedy "Christian" demi-gods posing as leaders. Part of me saw myself and my faith journey all tied up in that "plastic Christian" world of evangelical super-stars. And part of me wondered how much credibility Frank Schaeffer had left, and how much I need to take with a grain of salt.

The Author's Note:
I'm sure I have placed some of the events in the wrong years or have written that something happened in one place when it happened in another. this is a memoir, not a biography. To footnote this story or to have done research into dates and places and to correct the chronology would have been to indulge the conceit that my book is objective history. It is not. What I've written comes from a memory deformed by time, prejudice, flawed recall, and emotion.

Several places in the Schaeffer repeats this in some way or another, just to let us know he knows these are his experiences and memories, and not rigid history. I appreciate his confession and the recognition of this often over-looked truth. On the other hand, the book is still mostly written as a fact-filled look at not just Frank's life, but at the characters of many evangelical leaders. Because of that, I find myself keeping some of his observations at arm's length. I don't doubt the very negative opinion he has of James Dobson, among others, is true to his experience. I simply reserve the right to nuance Frank's view with the experiences of others.

Frank Schaeffer's book is an important read, even if it isn't always pleasant or comfortable. It will make many people mad. It will help other's feel vindicated. It will confuse some people because they will try to be like Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, who tried to find a way to make both Darcy and Wickham come out virtuous in their conflict. The problem is, there is no completely virtuous character in this book, or in real life. Life is messy, and Crazy for God shows one person's life at its messiest.

The look at the pro-life movement and how the Democratic Party blew the chance to gain credibility when it hardened its stance on abortion was fascinating, and perhaps some of the best information in the book. The look at how pro-life ended up a Republican party plank is so informative. Especially considering this was a "Catholic" issue for so long and most Catholics were Democrats.

How am I feeling now after I've thought about the book for a while? I don't know where I am theologically, but I know that even if I agree on specifics (like the sanctity of life) evangelical leaders don't speak for me anymore. This book only confirmed what I've been seeing for a while. Along the way someone (more than one, of course) co-opted Christianity, narrowed its scope, set the rules in stone, and built walls to exclude people and concentrate power...all in the name of "purity" and "godliness."

So take a deep breath and plunge in. It's not so much refreshing as cathartic.

On another note: I don't know much about writing, but I found Franky's book to be unevenly written and unnecessarily confusing in its timeline. It somehow fits his volatile personality. ;-) I plan to get some of his fiction to see how that reads.

Catching up...

2008-01-15T12:48:00.000-05:00

Well, if anyone is still out there reading, I thought I'd catch you up on a few things in my life. First off, I'm failing at my New Year's Resolution to write more! ;-) Oh well!

My teaching duties (one class, one day a week) started back on the 5th of January. the past two weeks I've been teaching my class (middle school Life Science) and substituting for the teacher in the middle school Physical Science class. It's been fun. I taught most of the students in that class last year, and will probably have most of them in Biology next fall. The double preps have taken a bit more time, especially since physical science (in this case light, color and color mixing) isn't my area of knowledge. However, it's been fun to rediscover it all.

I'm also in the process of finding a book to use for my high school Biology class in the fall. The book we've been using is 7 or 8 years old now. It was published before the Human Genome Project, so I want something more up-to-date. I am looking at two possibilities right now, neither which totally thrill me. When i settle on a book I need to start prepping for the fall-- reading and making class notes, and developing my labs to go with each lesson. Hopefully I can use a lot of the labs I have now.

We decided to adopt a cat from a rescue group in our area, and ended up with two! They are both adults (1 yr old and 2 yrs old). One is a a solid grey with a white bib, several white paws, and a cute little white "comma" that goes over his nose. His name is Jasper Darlington Higgins IV. The other is a soft grey tabby with buff (very light orange) markings, plus a white bib and white toes. His name is Fiddlesticks. (If you have ever read The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, you'll recognize the names as two of Morwen's cats.) Jasper has big round amber eyes, while Fiddles has slanted, almond-shaped eyes.

Both cats have been living in our bedroom since Sunday afternoon. They are good cats, but we haven't gotten a great deal of sleep. They're exceptionally sweet and affectionate. They purr when you look at them! Unfortunately this means that at 4 a.m. they're ready to snuggle and be petted, so they wake us up. I'm hoping we can let them have the run of the house soon.

They are "bomb-proof," meaning they don't get upset about much. They showed slight interest in our dog, and have been totally nonchalant with our resident cat, Neko. Unfortunately, to date Neko is anything but nonchalant about them! He is one angry cat. When he sees them (which has been rare, since we're trying to introduce them slowly), he puffs all his hair out to twice his normal size. this is impressive, since he is already a really large cat, weighing in at 15.5 lbs. The two cats we adopted are about 8 to 10 lbs. (In other words, normal cat size.)

Cookie, the dog, is great friends with the cats now. She was incredibly interested in them, but mostly I think she wanted to be where the action was. She always stays in my room with me when I am working or watching TV. So when the cats came, she didn't want to be left out in the hall. I think she decided that getting along with the cats meant being with us.

Yesterday was my anniversary! (24 years) It was a really busy carpool-and-school day, so we didn't celebrate, but Will brought me a card and a stuffed Beanie Baby race horse! :-D Hannah and the kids bought us a beautiful bouquet of roses. I was so surprised and pleased. This coming weekend Will and I have tickets to an art exhibit (Landscapes int he Age of Impressionism), and plan to be gone for the weekend. Our next door neighbor gave us a gift card this Christmas good for several area restaurants. Will and I plan to use that next weekend as well. (I take care of their animals when they go out of town, so this was a "thank you" gift.) We plan to take in at least one movie, too.

I'm reading Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer and enjoying it. He shoots from the hip, but doesn't pretend that his views aren't biased. I am enjoying his sometimes brutal honesty, but I am also enjoying the obvious love and respect he had for his parents, too. I plan to post some quotes from the book if I have time. Having been to Swiss L'Abri in the mid-70's, I am very aware of the atmosphere and attitudes he describes.

We've been working through some of the videos we got for Christmas. Most are re-watches, like Transformers, Harry Potter 5, and Stardust. But I have a few that I've never seen, so I'm looking forward to those.

I hope you're year is going well so far!

New Year's Resolutions??

2008-01-01T19:25:00.000-05:00

I've never done New Year's resolutions. So maybe I'll try to come up with a few this year.

This year I want to:

1. Figure out how to work my digital camera: how to upload pictures so I can share them. Maybe do the 365 Photoblog. (Although I need to get on with that if I'm going to do it!)

2. Spend more time listening to music. I've had a great time the last two days uploading several dozen CDs onto my iPod, and even buying some new ones at B&N or on iTunes. I'm rediscovering old favorites I hadn't listened to in years (like Led Zeppelin) and trying on some new ones (like Bush, Cake, and Death Cab for Cutie). It's so much fun.

3. Get more exercise. 'Nuff said.

4. Spend less "screen time" in the evenings- watching TV or on my computer. Read more and spend more time with the kids. (Although that may mean learning to play Wii games, and more screen time.)

5. Read the Bible. I've joined and online group reading through The Bible in three years. The plan is to read a selection each month and then ahve a day for discussion. I'm hoping the slower pace and the accountability will help me stay on track.

6. Read more. I've slacked off in the past two years and I'm not sure why.

7. Pray more, even if it doesn't look like my former idea of prayer.

8. Get involved in some real, tangible ways of helping others.

9. Try and stay within our budget.

10. Be flexible about my life. I want to try to hold plans loosely so that changes don't throw me for a loop.

11. To do a better job writing down my thoughts instead of keeping them in my head. Writing them down takes more discipline and time, but I think it will be well worth it.

That ought to keep me busy for the next year! We'll see in a year how I've done.

Happy New Year!

Saying good-bye to an old friend....

2007-12-27T15:10:00.000-05:00

At 3:30 December 26th, Will took our dear old golden retriever, Beau, to the vet to be put down. Beau had suffered a grand mal seizure Christmas evening and didn't seem to fully recover. After a long consultation with out dear, sweet vet, we made the tough decision. I've always been the one to take our animals to the vet since Will works, but I had already made plans with a friend and her children to go see the movie, Enchanted, and take Lydia. Since Lydia was very upset about Beau, it seemed wisest to keep our plans and for her and me to be out of the house when Beau left. Because of that Will had to be the one to take Beau and stay with him. It was very difficult. (Enchanted was a wonderful diversion, btw.)

Beau was over 12.5 years old. We picked him up when he was 12 weeks old in Asheville, NC, where my mom had picked him out of a litter of 8 squirming, roly-poly puppies. She picked him, in part, because he had a tiny black spot on his head, and it was the only way to tell him from the other 7 yellow fur balls. I've said many times since then that God put that black spot there so Mom would choose him. He was the perfect pet for us.

Beau was humble and gentle without being scared or shy. He was exuberant, happy, and loving. He was the quintessential golden. He also "yodeled." That always surprised people! From the earliest age, Beau understood children and that he needed to be gentle with them. Even as a puppy he never nipped or jumped up on our then 18 month old daughter. He obeyed her when she would order him in her best toddler-talk to go into his kennel. He'd patiently go inside, sit down and wait for her to let him out again; although usually she went in with him!

Several times when our youngest child was just a toddler we found Beau sit patiently in front of an open container of dog food waiting for her to feed him one piece at a time. He never tried to go through her to get to the food. About that time we also took a sweet picture of 2 year old Lydia sitting on top of Beau brushing his head with a doll brush.

Beau was never territorial, and willingly put up with a long line of dogs invading his space. A friend of mine used to drop her dog off daily while she was at work. We inherited another golden for several years, and finally we were given a terrier-mix puppy. Beau put up with being a life-sized chew toy for the puppy (named Cookie). Cookie literally used his ears for tug-of-war. From the very beginning he would lay down so she could "wrestle" with him, something that continued for the rest of his life. (Beau was about 64 lbs and Cookie is 14 lbs.)

Beau also loved people. Everybody. He was one of the few dogs I've known who seemed to think going to the groomer's or the vet's was a treat. He seemed to think any kind of attention, even shots and ear cleanings, were a form of love and affection. And no matter how painful the procedure, he never had to be restrained beyond someone holding his head. He was always full of trust and obedience.

The last thing I said to Beau was this: "You got it right, buddy. Thank you."

Unusual exercise in "walking the walk"

2007-12-25T13:38:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Jimmy for this article:

Pastor's Challenge Shocks Church

Flannery O'Conner- It's long, but worth it.

2007-12-22T10:27:00.000-05:00

From America- the National Catholic Weekly Dec 24, 2007

Flannery O'Connor's Religious Vision

Flannery O’Connor died during the Second Vatican Council, while the bishops were writing anew what she had always known: that the church is the body of Christ, the people of God; that laypeople are its flesh and blood; and that the clergy and religious orders are its servant-leaders. While O’Connor was a supreme artist in fiction, she was also a particularly valuable witness to the Catholic Church and its leaders in this country, especially as she appears in her collected letters, The Habit of Being, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979). Hers is the testimony of a watchful, honest, faith-filled and eloquent layperson; and she had much to say about the experience of living the faith within the Catholic Church, especially in a society and a culture that had marginalized genuine Christian faith and practice.

Our present age has been described as one in which people place a high value on spirituality and a low value on religion, especially organized religion. Of particular interest, then, is O’Connor’s thinking about the experience of church, of the assembly of believers. She valued the church highly and observed it acutely, warts and all. If the church made life endurable, it also provided much that had to be endured. “You have to suffer as much from the church as for it,” she once wrote. “The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.” She went on to explain why we suffer from the church: “The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sake of the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” God is as patient with the entire church as he is with each lost sheep, and many of us Catholics have very little patience with either.

The church is made up of imperfect pilgrims on a long, difficult journey, and O’Connor described them well: “The Catholic Church is composed of those who accept what she teaches, whether they are good or bad, and there is constant struggle through the help of the sacraments to be good.” In “Choruses from the ‘Rock,’” T. S. Eliot says that modern people do not like the church because “she is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.” (Think of issues like abortion, euthanasia, welfare reform, capital punishment and more.) O’Connor might have appreciated Eliot’s remark.
The Human Element

Within the visible church, the Holy Spirit is constantly acting in the lives of its members, individually and collectively. Thus, the church cannot be accurately judged or evaluated by what her critics observe externally. O’Connor pointed this out to one of her friends:

You judge [the church] strictly by its human element, by unimaginative and half-dead Catholics who would be startled to know the nature of what they defend by formula. The miracle is that the Church’s dogma is kept pure both by and from such people. Nature is not prodigal of genius and the church makes do with what nature gives her. At the age of 11, you encounter some old priest who calls you a heretic for inquiring about evolution; at about the same time Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., is in China discovering Peking man.

The “human element” in the church was a frequent target of O’Connor’s wit, as when she proposed this motto for the Catholic press of her day: “We guarantee to corrupt nothing but your taste.” More seriously, she quoted St. Augustine’s advice to the “wheat” in the church not to leave the threshing floor of life before the harvest is complete, just because there is so much of that disgusting chaff around! In this connection, she slyly suggested what the difficulty may be for more sensitive Catholics (referring to one young woman in particular): “She probably sees more stupidity and vulgarity than she does sin and these are harder to put up with than sin, harder on the nerves.”

Meanwhile, the world goes on judging the church in utilitarian fashion, using the same standard it would apply to the Rotary or the Kiwanis. O’Connor challenged this ap-proach, writing that “any Catholic or Protestant is defenseless before those who judge his religion by how well its members live up to it or are able to explain it.” The surface is easy to judge, she was saying, but not the interior operations of the Holy Spirit. She illustrated this principle with a touching reference to the vocation of Catholic priests, whom she often found to be overworked and unimaginative:

It is easy for any child to find out the faults in the sermon on his way home from church every Sunday. It is impossible to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his lack of strength, give up his life to the service of God’s people, however bumblingly he may go about it.

While O’Connor defended her church against superficial and unfair judgments, she was neither a whitewasher nor a fatalist, and she was an implacable foe of complacency. She believed that the church must struggle toward greater virtue as surely as each of its members. She wrote quite forcefully in this regard: “It’s our business to change the external faults of the church—the vulgarity, the lack of scholarship, the lack of intellectual honesty—wherever we find them and however we can.”
Flaws in the Church

Here are three examples of faults in the church that O’Connor criticized and wished to see corrected. I think they are in order of increasing severity.

First, she condemned smugness as the great Catholic sin. Now, 45 years later, perhaps something else would head her list; but smugness would probably still be listed. Referring to the German priest and author Romano Guardini, she wrote about smugness: “I find it in myself and I don’t dislike it any less. One reason Guardini is a relief to read is that he has nothing of it. With a few exceptions the American clergy, when it takes to the pen, brings this particular sin with it in full force.” About 20 years ago a bumper sticker appeared that read: “If you feel God is far away, guess who moved?” If O’Connor had lived to see one of those signs on a Georgia road, I like to think that she would have skewered the sentiment as very smug, even as she chuckled at the rampant vulgarity of bumper-sticker theology.

Related to smugness is glibness, which she described as “the great danger in answering people’s questions about religion.” Again, a sense of mystery will give the Christian apologist a sense of humility: if I am convinced that I have the truth about God, I am much more likely to be obnoxious about it than if I am convinced that God’s truth has me.

O’Connor expressed impatience with the kind of Catholicism—and Catholic fiction—that kept everything nice, shallow, cute and safe. She described what she called “A nice vapid-Catholic distrust of finding God in action of any range and depth. This is not the kind of Catholicism that has saved me so many years in learning to write, but then this is not Catholicism at all.” Genuine Catholicism, she felt, must be as radical and demanding as its founder’s teaching.

Still another Catholic fault O’Connor described is, I believe, an evergreen reality in the church: a Jansenistic disdain for human weakness and struggle and distrust of questions, speculations and discussions of any depth. Of the pseudo-faith of such persons she said:

I know what you mean about being repulsed by the church when you have only the Mechanical-Jansenist Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.

In considering such people’s self-righteous judgments of others, she made an acute observation: “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.” By contrast, Christians who have struggled with their demons are better equipped to show compassion toward others.
Religion Into Therapy

O’Connor had a deep distaste and contempt for modern, sanitized, “empty” religion. Because she embraced an imaginative vision of religion as the mystery of God’s saving action intersecting with all that is earthly, O’Connor remarked to one correspondent: “All around you today you will find people accepting ‘religion’ that has been rid of its religious elements.” Elsewhere she described this development in more detail:

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.

The issue of religion bled dry of its content is featured in what is probably the most famous story told about O’Connor. As a very young and unknown writer, she was visiting New York and was taken to a party at the home of Mary McCarthy, ex-Catholic and ex-believer, a sophisticated and accomplished novelist, essayist and critic. What follows is O’Connor’s description of the encounter:

We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing in such company for me to say.... Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most “portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of.

In The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003), Paul Elie writes of this exchange, “The closing remark is the most famous of all O’Connor’s remarks, an economical swipe at the reductive, liberalizing view of religion.”

O’Connor even locates one important moment in the development of this religious trend in this country. With some amusement she recalls a talk she gave at a college: “I told them that when Emerson decided in 1832 that he could no longer celebrate the Lord’s Supper unless the bread and wine were removed, that an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place.”
‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’

For some readers one of the most surprising, even jarring, features of O’Connor’s fiction is its consistently comic character, even as the stories and novels pursue such serious themes of faith and grace. Elie describes an experience the author had when visiting the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in Fort Tryon Park in New York City: “She was ‘greatly taken’ with a wooden statue on display in one of the chapels. ‘It was the Virgin holding the Christ child and both were laughing; not smiling, laughing.’” He concludes: “It was a piece to emulate as well as admire; like her own work, it was religious and comic at the same time.”

The betrayal of religion is downright diabolical in O’Connor’s view, and so it is portrayed in her fiction. For her, the crucial choice facing each of us is between the “lost” life with Christ and the worldly “saved” life without him. Thus, the most fiendish of temptations is to offer a saved, worldly life, but to offer it under the guise of being generically “Christian,” though with no Christ content whatsoever.

In this connection Elie describes a type of character that appears over and over again in O’Connor’s stories: “the middle-aged busybody who knows exactly what she thinks, who sees all and understands nothing.” One example is the character of Mrs. May in the story “Greenleaf.” At one point Mrs. May comes upon Mrs. Greenleaf in the woods, murmuring over and over again, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” O’Connor wrote: “Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building, like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”

O’Connor had much to say about living together as church in the midst of modern culture, but finally we should turn to one simple statement she made about herself: “I write because I write well.” Nearly 45 years after her death, believers and unbelievers alike agree with her more than ever. She wrote well. But there is so much more than that to be said of her. One point will suffice here: How wonderfully different Flannery O’Connor was from Mrs. May. She thought that the name of Jesus, the reality of Jesus, belonged everywhere, indeed was everywhere. Regarding the Christian faith, Flannery O’Connor was the polar opposite of Mrs. May, because she, of course, believed all of it was true.

The betrayal of religion is downright diabolical in O’Connor’s view. The crucial choice is between the ‘lost’ life with Christ and the worldly ‘saved’ life without him.

Most Rev. George H. Niederauer is the archbishop of San Francisco. This article is an adapted excerpt from his Lane Center Lecture, delivered Sept. 28, 2007, at the University of San Francisco.

For more on Flannery O"Conner, read this archived article she wrote for America in 1957. The Church and the Catholic Writer

An Interview with Frank Schaeffer

2007-12-10T20:42:00.000-05:00

John Whitehead from The Rutherford Institute interviewed Frank Schaeffer about his book, Crazy for God.

The whole interview is worth reading (in fact the book looks worth reading), but this part caught my attention:

JW: You note in your book that you slowly realized that the Religious Right leaders you were helping to gain power were not necessarily conservatives at all in the old sense of the word. They were anti-American religious revolutionaries.

FS: I personally came to believe that a lot of the issues that were being latched onto by the Christian Right, whether it was the gay issue or abortion or other things, were actually being used for negative political purposes. They were used to structure a power base for people who then threw their weight around. The other thing I began to understand is that in dismissing the whole culture as decadent, in dismissing the public school movement as godless, in talking about anybody who opposed them as evil, the Religious Right was only a mirror image of the New Left. Thus, the Religious Right and the New Left are really two sides of the same coin. What gets left out is a basic discussion about the United States and the reality of living here, the freedoms we enjoy and the benefits of a pluralistic culture where people are not crushing each other over beliefs. This gets lost. Thus, the kind of harshness you see in left and right-wing blogs today, for instance, such as it’s red state, blue state America, I just got sick of it. In other words, the Religious Right was as negative and anti-American as anybody I ever talked to on the Left. So the people we had coming through L’Abri in the late sixties and early seventies bashing the United States in a knee-jerk way over the Vietnam War was exactly the same kind of thing that you would hear in a different way from Falwell and Dobson and these other people.
***

I have yet to read the book, but I'm looking forward to reading more about Frank Schaeffer's look at truth, honesty and how the Religious Right has co-opted the public representation of faith in America.

The Alternative Christmas Letter

2007-12-04T17:08:00.000-05:00

Note: I love my kids and I'm proud of them. This "alternative" Christmas letter is a spoof. Or maybe not. Maybe it's life as we live it instead of just the high points.

Another year has come and almost gone. As I look back over my year, I wanted to share the ups and downs with my family and friends. So fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Hannah will graduate May 10 from North Carolina State University with a bachelor's degree in history. On May 17th she will marry Erik, and spend a week long honeymoon in Charleston, SC. When she returns she will put into practice all the practical knowledge she's gained in school. She only needs to learn, "Do you want fries with that?" in Spanish and she'll be set for life!

The wedding will be a simple affair, not only because the happy couple doesn't want a large to-do, but also because they haven't made any wedding plans yet. All we know for sure is the date and the presider (and the participants). I figure they'll be married when they leave for their honeymoon, and I choose not to worry about the rest.

Luke is now attending the local community college working toward an Associates Degree in computer networking. So far, so good. He's not driving yet, and he still doesn't have a job, but, hey, he's got a nice girlfriend!

Thomas has broken the home school mode and is now enrolled in a public charter school for 11th grade. He's making friends, making good grades, and generally being productive. What a guy!

Both boys are active in Youth Group and volunteering at church. They also spend something like 40 hours a week playing video games. Physical exercise consists of walking up the stairs to get another soda. Along with my future son-in-law, Erik, they are what I affectionately call my cave dwellers. My "family room" consists of 3 desk top computers, a widescreen HD TV, a smaller 27" TV, a PS, a PS2, two xBoxes, and an avalanche of video games. I toss food down there occasionally on weekends.

I still home school the girls, Rebekah 14, and Lydia 10, although I have to admit I outsource a lot. Rebekah takes writing, science, geography, and Spanish with other teachers/classes. Lydia does art, literature, and science in enrichment classes.

The theme of this year with the girls is music. The sing in two groups each, plus take piano lessons. I still have some control over their schedules, so they probably only play video games 20 hours a week. Less for Lydia since she still actually likes to play with friends.

So how do we spend Quality Time??? MMORPGing! (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) Or playing Halo III together! A family that parties together, lives longer... at least in the virtual realm of World of Warcraft! We used to eat dinner together, but that was before two computers showed up on my dining room table and never left. No room for food, only computers and school books. Now if we want to talk to one another we use email, or perhaps voice chat if we're playing the same game. I used to IM, but I couldn't keep up, so I still yell down the steps when I need to talk to someone. They think I'm a dinosaur.

When I do find myself in the same room with one or more of the kids, they are still free with the hugs. Plus, now that they are all virtuoso's on Guitar Hero, they are in-the-know about classic rock music! Any 10 year old that recognizes Heart and knows who Eric Clapton is okay in my book!! ;-)

Oh yeah, and did I mention Will joined the Catholic Church this year??

Merry Christmas to all you "alternative" families out there. Families with real live kids and lots to celebrate even if no one won a Nobel Prize this year. :-)

An interview with Philip Pullman

2007-11-29T14:11:00.000-05:00

I saw this link on iMonk and thought it was worth posting here. Anyone interested in what Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy, has to say about his books, the movie (The Golden Compass), and Christianity should find this interview enlightening.

Peter Chattaway interviews Philip Pullman

I'll post my own thoughts soon.

Happy Thanksgiving to all...

2007-11-22T21:33:00.000-05:00

Our Thanksgiving didn't work out the way we'd planned, but it was great, nonetheless. Originally we planned to take the week in New Bern, NC. We planned to go out to eat for Thanksgiving, and do some site seeing and relaxing the rest of the week. I made these plans last spring and no one seemed to mind, but two weeks ago I started hearing rumblings of discontent. It seems it "not right" to spend Thanksgiving away from home unless you're spending it with family. The grumbling got louder and louder until Will and I realized it wasn't worth it. I canceled our plans and we stayed home. We didn't make final plans until the last minute, so we still planned to go out to eat. That all changed yesterday when a friend called and invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner. Inviting my clan at the last minute is no small thing. There are eight of us, including six who are adults, or who eat like adults! Not only did they invite us, they had the whole dinner planned and I didn't have to do anything but help out once I got there.

We had a great afternoon, ate plenty of great food, played games, and talked, talked, talked. The kids from teens down went to a local park after dinner and played Ultimate Frisbee. I'm afraid the adults were too full to move that much!

And if being blessed by one family isn't enough, we received a second invitation from another family. Wow! How blessed can we be?

I'm thankful for many, many things this year, but right now friends and family are at the top of the list.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my online friends, as well. You brighten my days!

Understanding and tolerance....

2007-11-14T13:30:00.000-05:00

Tolerance and understanding are hard and, maybe, impossible. We are each rather small packages of our own life experience with limited abilities to get outside and truly see things from another's point of view.

For years I've thought a great deal about understanding vs tolerance, but lately I am simply not so sure it's as "easy" as opening your mind to new ideas and not prejudging. Perhaps I am being really nit-picky about the definition of understanding and tolerance, but I also see how really, really difficult it is in practice, even if it seems possible in theory.

Sometimes I feel we have it really backwards. I think it is much easier to tolerate than to understand. I do not understand a lesbian or gay person's position. It is fathomless to me. I can tolerate and I can treat the person with respect, but I don't understand. I may respect a friend who leaves her faith behind, but I don't understand it. I may see the steps she took, read the books she read, and ask a million questions, but in the end, since I am not making the same decision, I am not truly understanding her or her reasons. I can "tolerate," I can "agree to disagree," I can love, but I cannot understand.

So I guess I'm saying it is possible to understand the process, or someone's position, to better understand a line of reasoning, or the foundation behind actions and life decisions. But I do not think that is the same thing as truly understanding a person or another position.

I also don't know how much tolerance there is when two positions are diametrically opposed to one another. I won't stop fighting to end abortion on demand. I don't care how much I respect or "understand" the reasons people have for being pro-choice, but I think they are wrong and I'll keep trying to change the system if I can't change their minds. That's just one issue. When it goes on and on, I see no way people with truly divergent positions can tolerate each other forever. It's like a law of physics- two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time. One will have to move before the other gets there. Someone has to give ground because two opposing views cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We can't have abortion on demand and ban abortion. We can't tolerate gay marriages and ban gay marriages. Etc., etc.

So, yes, I can better understand a position other than my own. And I strive to. But I am less sure that understanding leads to tolerance because 1) I don't think true understanding is possible while holding divergent positions and 2) true tolerance isn't possible in the long run.

What I'm getting at is slippery, even to me.

I'll use the example that came up in my life recently: Rollings saying Dumbledore is gay. I was accused of intolerance because I was upset by Rowlings' "revelations." I was told that "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is a hopeless failure because I am hating something integral to a person, their gayness. "How would you feel if people said they liked you but hated Christ, or Christianity? How would you feel if people felt like the should protect their children from you and your ideas?"

Well, huh! That would stink. (But guess what, I think that's happening all over the country, as evidenced by the recent Barna report on how negatively Christianity and Christians are perceived.)

The point I'm trying to make is, I can't be "tolerant" the way these people want me to be. Tolerance means acceptance. Tolerance means I allow them to continue to influence public opinion while I keep mine to myself. And tolerance will always mean that, because tolerance means leaving people alone to live their life they way they want.

I can't do that and neither can they. They aren't tolerant of my beliefs or my right to live my life as I want to, which includes speaking out against placing homosexual relationships on par with heterosexual ones for marriage and child raising.

So the bottom line is, no matter how much we like and respect each other, no matter how much we try to understand, we cannot "tolerate" each other forever. We hold mutually exclusive ideas. To truly tolerate a position you are opposed to, you have to avoid discussing it. You have to avoid it, period. Because real engagement with an idea will mean the differences in opinion will surface, and someone, or everyone, will be labeled "intolerant."

Stalemate!

Dealing with memories....

2007-11-13T18:16:00.000-05:00

Music is a powerful prompt for memories. I've heard that smells are that way, too, but music seems to be either a more powerful, or perhaps just more ubiquitous, cause. While I drive, which is frequently these days as I carpool the kids, I often listen to the radio. I have several stations preset in the car, and all of them play classic rock or a mix of new hits as well as old. Lately I've noticed the music keeps taking me back in time. Sometimes I don't even recognize what is happening. It starts out as a daydream, where I suddenly recall people, places, and events from 25 or 30 years ago. I've only just started to realize it's the music that starts these "flashbacks."

Of course, there are certain songs that put me back to a very particular place and time. Like "I Shot the Sheriff" by Clapton. I was working with my best friend as a waitress at a restaurant that served mainly pizza and sandwiches. It was called The Chat and Chew. I kid you not. Much of the time I worked there, Clapton's song was on the charts, and it was playing on the jukebox several times and hour. It's a good song to work to, with a lively beat and catchy tune. The problem is, thinking about that job makes me think of many other things going on around that time that I'd rather not remember. Like my friend, who moved out to California and lost touch.

That's the whole problem with these music-driven memories. You can't control them. They take you back whether you want to go or not, and they take you to the whole time period, warts and all.

It was a song that spurred my Gallop Down Memory Lane last week, for example. While I loved thinking about Rightpot and being an exercise rider, I don't want to remember other things from that summer. In fact, I don't seem to be able to think about my racing days without more pain and regrets than fondness. It's a shame, too, because I loved the horses. It had been my life's dream to work full time in some aspect of the horse world. The horses were great. The circumstances were not.

Part of the pain associated with the memories are nostalgic. To be young, strong, fit, and on a horse again! To have the illusion of freedom in my life and choices. To have that carelessness that youth has, taking it all for granted. Thinking you'll never really be older and grayer. Or perhaps simply not thinking about it at all. Because who at 2o can understand what it is to be 40, or 50, or 60? But a 50 year old like myself can remember what it was like to be 20. Yes, some of the pain is simply the desire for what is gone- youth, energy, and abandon.

But most of the discomfort in the memories is not what I want back, but what I wish I'd never experienced to begin with. Along with the supposed freedom of youth comes the choices one lives to regret, the failings one wishes to forever erase. Alongside the joy at being young, healthy, and doing something I loved, were four years of a dysfunctional marriage, betrayal, anger, revenge, and regret. It's not just what was done to me that I want to forget, but what I did to others as I lashed back, sought comfort, gave up, and finally left.

For 25 years I've mainly pushed the memories back while I've focused on my wonderful husband and family. Along with the bad memories, I've had to push the good ones back, as well. Yet as Trisha Yearwood put it, the song remembers when.

But that's just a lot of water
Underneath a bridge I burned
And there's no use in backtrackin'
Around corners I have turned
Still I guess some things we bury
Are just bound to rise again
For even if the whole world has forgotten
The song remembers when

So now I'm walking, and galloping, down memory lane, and it's a mixed bag of emotions. I guess in part I'm showing a sort of pathetic mid-life yearning for youth. But also, I'm just doing what we all do- trying to learn how to grow old gracefully. For me that means facing down a few demons and coming to grips with the forward march of time.

A gallop down memory lane

2007-11-05T18:38:00.002-05:00

The early summer mornings don't start off hot in Delaware. At least not at 6 a.m. I remember it was one of those almost cool mornings, the kind where you get a hint of a chill as you pass through the shade of a tree or building, as I made my way through the maze of barns on the backside of Delaware Park Racetrack. I had just turned 23, and had been working in some way or another with racehorses for over 3 years. I was married to a struggling trainer and he and I had four or five horses in training at the racetrack that summer. To supplement our "income" I was working as a freelance exercise rider. I had succeeded in getting hired by another small stable to ride three to five mounts a day after our farrier put in a good word for me. That's where I was headed that beautiful June morning.

As I approached the shed row, I saw the hotwalker (a person who walks the horse around the shed row, either after they exercise or when the horse is getting a day off, like after a race) walking a beautiful bay colt I didn't recognize. As I was waiting for my first mount, I asked the assistant trainer, Steve, about the new colt. It seems they had bought him in a $15000 claiming race the afternoon before off of a mass market stable run by King Leatherbury.

(Note: A claiming race is a race where you enter your horse for a specific dollar amount, and anyone who meets certain criteria (different tracks have different rules about who is eligible to claim) can put the amount of the claim into an account with the horseman's bookkeeper and claim (buy) your horse. The idea behind claiming races is to keep people honest. That way owners run their horses against other horses of equal value.)

My first question was, "Will I get him?" He was gorgeous and feisty, dancing around the shed row, and I really wanted to be his exercise rider. My second question was, "What's his name?"

Well, his name was Rightpot, and I talked them into letting me handle him. The trainer was skeptical at first because Rightpot had a reputation as a handful on the track. But I convinced them that what he needed was a lady's touch.

I wasn't just blowing smoke. I knew the way most of Leatherbury's boys rode. They stood straight up in the irons and hauled on the horse's mouth. In my opinion, that's how riders with little talent were able to ride a wide variety of horses without having to get to know them individually. Leatherbury was a master at the claiming game and had 100 horses or more stabled at Delaware Park that summer. With high turnover and high numbers, his exercise riders didn't have the chance to get to know their mounts.

I found several of Leatherbury's boys in the cafeteria later and asked about Rightpot. The one who rode Rightpot was there, and he told me the horse pulled hard and lugged out (tried to run toward the outside of the track). "Be sure you use a ring bit on him! You'll pull anything else right through his mouth trying to keep him straight."

I went back to my own barn and dug out my favorite bit, a full cheek snaffle. The full cheek snaffle is not typically a racing bit. It's used more for hunters. But I knew that with the long side pieces there was no way it'd get pulled through Rightpot's mouth.

Rightpot and I got to know each other over the next few days. I had a totally different riding style than Leatherbury's boys. I tended to ride low over the horse's back, crossing the reins and bracing them against the top of the horse's neck. That way, the horse was pulling against himself more than me. He quickly became a favorite of mine, and his whole attitude towards life changed. The new bit, the training style, and I'd like to think the rider, all worked together to help Rightpot relax and enjoy his gallops instead of fighting constantly.

Two or three weeks later I was in the grandstands on another beautiful summer day, this time in the afternoon. From there we all gathered to watch Rightpot win his first allowance race. (An allowance is a race in which a horse is entered according to eligibility conditions, usually the number of races it has won or money it has earned. Allowance races are a level above claiming races but a level below stakes races.) I cashed in a modest bet on him, but I was mostly just proud to know I was part of it. Part of helping Rightpot not only to win, but to enjoy himself doing it.

Rightpot went on to run well in a variety of allowance races that summer, and I had fun riding him for his morning workouts. That fall, his trainer left for a Maryland track and I stayed locally to work on a training farm. I worked at Penn State RaceTrack some that fall and winter, but never went full time on a track again. By the next spring I was divorced and starting life over again. But I remember. I remember the rhythm of the horse's strides, the feeling of the rough reins and the prickly mane on my hands. And the sounds, hooves thudding on the track, the snorts of breath making a kind of popping sound, the squeak of the small leather saddle, my own breath or my words of encouragement and correction. I remember the smells. The warm smell of horse and sweat, the smell of leather, manure, and the dirt track.

I never saw Rightpot again, but when I close my eyes and remember the racetrack, he's usually the horse I'm riding.

My visitor from heaven

2007-10-30T20:59:00.001-05:00

While the dead don't care, the dead matter. The dead matter to the living. And while getting the dead where they need to go, we help the living get where they need to go, too. Thomas Lynch, "The Undertaker" (Frontline)

My water broke just after midnight on Dec 26, 1987. We left our 2 yr old daughter in the capable hands of a family friend, and trekked through the unseasonably warm, rainy night to the hospital. Our doctor met us there in the emergency room. He was a GP, back when some GP's still delivered babies. He was a kind and gentle man.

All the excitement started to fade as he checked me. After a while he said he was ordering an ultrasound. "I don't know if the baby is head first. I think I feel hair, but I don't feel the skull." I laid there, and Will held my hand. We were quiet. While the technician was doing the ultrasound, he asked me a few questions, but one question has remained in my memory because of the way it made my heart freeze. "I understand you have a healthy child at home?"

Yes, we had a healthy child at home. This question was the first real understanding that we didn't have a healthy child in utero.

The technician and the doctor left, obviously consulting on the findings. I started to cry and told my husband "I guess we'll be doing this again." An odd thing to say, I know.

About 10 minutes later our doctor returned. He didn't have the poker face down. His eyes were red and he was struggling somewhat to keep his composure.

"The baby has some major problems. He has a fully developed brain, but no skull. His lungs are not fully developed, and his heart is not formed correctly. He cannot survive. The baby is going to die."

The next 6 or 7 hours are a bit of a blur. My labor was weak so they started me on pitocin. Not fun. I asked for an epidural, thinking I was not emotionally capable of going through labor knowing my child would die after birth. But this was a holiday night and there was only one anesthesiologist at the hospital, and he was busy in the emergency room with a car wreck. I would do this on my own, and in retrospect, I'm glad I did. I remember watching TV, there was a horse show on ESPN. I love horses and I watched them gracefully circle the ring taking impossibly high fences for over an hour, losing myself in their rhythm and motion.

Toward dawn we started the phone calls, even as I labored toward the final hour or so. My mom, my best friend, our elder. "Mom, the baby isn't going to make it." "Susan, the baby isn't going to make it." "Please pray for strength."

As I moved into transition, an ultrasound technition arrived to do a high definition ultrasound of the baby. Looking back later I had to laugh at the absurdity of it. I laid on my back enduring the worst labor pains so he could get a good image of a sick baby that would be here in an hour or less. He could have waited and just looked at the baby itself! But, of course, I was in a teaching hospital. I shouldn't be surprised. And Will and I weren't in any shape to question.

At the end of the ultrasound the anesthesiologist came in. I shook my head, looked at my doctor and said, "I have to push!" Isaac William made his very short debut a few minutes later. He moved very little. The nurse and doctor were in tears. My nurse was Catholic and asked permission to baptize Isaac. I said yes. We all needed comfort, and I wouldn't deny her that. Anyway, I've always like that we baptized him, Isaac William G., I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Isaac died in my arms after only 10 minutes or so. Our doctor prayed for all of use. God was there in that room. Isaac stayed with us for almost an hour. And then we said good-bye.

We allowed the hospital to take tissue for research. Isaac was diagnosed with "Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Perinatal Lethal Form." We found out later during genetic counseling that it was most likely a dominant new mutation and there was little or no chance we'd have another child with the disorder. Since I am a biologist with an emphasis in genetics, I actually understood what the counselors were telling us.

But I jump ahead of the story. Since I had just delivered a baby, they sent me to the maternity ward. Not a good move. I could hear them wheeling the babies to the other mothers. I asked to go home. The hardest thing I've ever done is leave that hospital without my baby.

We didn't have a funeral or a memorial service for Isaac. It was the day after Christmas, and I remember thinking, "This will be so hard on everybody, trying to change plans to come for a funeral." I didn't even know where to begin, and we had almost no money. But I regret that decision.

Oh, I don't mope about it. But I now know the importance of the dead to the living. Other people besides Will and I needed to meet and say goodbye to Isaac. If I'd known then what I know now...

So I dedicate this to the memory of my son, Isaac William. Born and reborn December 26, 1987. As I look over my five surviving children, I still see the gap where you should be. My visitor from heaven.

VISITOR FROM HEAVEN - 1993

A visitor from Heaven
If only for a while
A gift of love to be returned
We think of you and smile

A visitor from Heaven
Accompanied by grace
Reminding of a better love
And of a better place

With aching hearts and empty arms
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we’re so glad you came
We’re so glad you came

A visitor from Heaven
If only for a day
We thank Him for the time He gave
And now it’s time to say
We trust you to the Father’s love
And to His tender care
Held in the everlasting arms
And we’re so glad you’re there
We’re so glad you’re there

With breaking hearts and open hands
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we’re so glad you came
We’re so glad you came

A different look at the Reformation- I-Monk does it again

2007-10-29T16:51:00.000-05:00

I-Monk is Letting Some of the Air Out of the Reformation Day Balloon.

I recommend it.

The Folly of Multitasking...

2007-10-27T09:07:00.000-05:00

This is an article from The Week. It was in the regular column called The Last Word. It's a bit long, but humorous and enlightening. Discussing the article with my husband led to a talk about how to set up "flow" times...uninterrupted times in our days where we can focus on one thing and get it done well. That has led me to think of ways I can organize my week into a sort of block schedule that allows me to stop multitasking so much. If the research sited in the article is true, then it might be one reason I'm battling mild depression and short term memory glitches.

The Last Word

The folly of multitasking

Our cell phones and computers had us convinced we could do five things at once. But neuroscience, says novelist Walter Kirn, is now finding that the mental gymnastics required actually dumbs us down.In the Midwestern town where I grew up (a town so small that the phone line on our block was a “party line” well into the 1960s), there were two skinny brothers in their 30s who built a car that could drive into the river and become a fishing boat. My pals and I thought the car-boat was a wonder. A thing that did one thing but also did another thing—especially the opposite thing, but at least an unrelated thing—was our idea of a great invention and a bold stride toward the future. Where we got this idea, I’ll never know, but it caused us to envision a world-tocome teeming with crossbred, hyphenated machines. Refrigerator–TV sets. Dishwasher– air conditioners. Table saw– popcorn poppers. Camera-radios.

With that last dumb idea, we were getting close to something, as I’ve noted every time I’ve dropped or fumbled my cell phone and snapped a picture of a wall or the middle button of my shirt. Impressive. Ingenious. Yet juvenile. Arbitrary. And why a substandard camera, anyway? Why not an excellent electric razor? Because (I told myself at the cell phone store in the winter of 2003, as I handled a feature-laden upgrade that my new contract entitled me to purchase at a deep discount that also included a rebate) there may come a moment on a plane or in a subway station or at a mall when I and the other able-bodied males will be forced to subdue a terrorist, and my color snapshot of his trussed-up body will make the front page of USA Today and appear at the left shoulder of all the superstars of cable news.

While I waited for my date with citizenjournalist destiny, I took a lot of self-portraits in my Toyota and forwarded them to a girlfriend in Colorado, who reciprocated from her Jeep. Neither one of us almost died. For months. But then, one night on a snowy two-lane highway, while I was crossing Wyoming to see my girl’s real face, my phone made its chirpy you-have-a-picture noise, and I glanced down in its direction while also, apparently, swerving off the pavement and sailing over a steep embankment toward a barbed-wire fence.

It was interesting to me—in retrospect, after having done some reading about the frenzied activity of the multitasking brain—how late in the process my prefrontal cortex, where our cognitive switchboards hide, changed its focus from the silly phone (Where did it go? Did it slip between the seats? I wonder if this new photo is a nude shot or if it’s another one from the topless series that seemed like such a breakthrough a month ago but now I’m getting sick of) to the important matter of a steel fence post sliding spear-like across my hood. The laminated windshield glass must have been high quality; the point of the post bounced off it, leaving only a starshaped surface crack. But I was still barreling toward sagebrush, and who knew what rocks and boulders lay in wait.

Five minutes later, I’d driven out of the field and gunned it back up the embankment onto the highway and was proceeding south, heart slowing some, satellite radio tuned to a soft-rock channel called the Heart, which was playing lots of soothing Céline Dion.

“I just had an accident trying to see your picture.”

“Will you get here in time to take me out to dinner?”

“I almost died.”

“Well, you sound fine.”

“Fine’s not a sound.”

I never forgave her for that detachment. I never forgave myself for buying a camera phone. We all remember the promises. The slogans. They were all about freedom, liberation. Supposedly we were in handcuffs and wanted out of them. The key that dangled in front of us was a microchip. “Where do you want to go today?” asked Microsoft in a mid-1990s ad campaign. The suggestion was that there were endless destinations—some geographic, some social, some intellectual—that you could reach in milliseconds by loading the right devices with the right software. It was further insinuated that where you went was purely up to you, not your spouse, your boss, your kids, or your government.

Autonomy through automation. This was the embryonic fallacy that grew up into the monster of multitasking. Human freedom, as classically defined (to think and act and choose with minimal interference by outside powers), was not a product that firms like Microsoft could offer, but they recast it as something they could provide. A product for which they could raise the demand by refining its features, upping its speed, restyling its appearance, and linking it up with all the other products that promised freedom, too, but had replaced it with three inferior substitutes that they could market in its name: Efficiency, convenience, and mobility.

For proof that these bundled minor virtues don’t amount to freedom but are, instead, a formula for a period of mounting frenzy climaxing with a lapse into fatigue, consider that “Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”? Did anyone boldly ask, “What business is it of yours?” Was anyone brave enough to say, “Frankly, I want to go back to bed”?

Maybe a few of us. Not enough of us. Everyone else was going places, it seemed, and either we started going places, too— especially to those places that weren’t places (another word they’d redefined) but were just pictures or documents or videos or boxes on screens where strangers conversed by typing—or else we’d be nowhere (a location once known as “here”) doing nothing (an activity formerly labeled “living”). What a waste this would be. What a waste of our new freedom. Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task—and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask—of trying to be free. It isn’t working, it never has worked.

The scientists know this too, and they think they know why. Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn. Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20- somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction— but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.)

They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it. This is the great irony of multitasking— that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)

Productive? Efficient? More like running up and down a beach repairing a row of sand castles as the tide comes rolling in and the rain comes pouring down. Multitasking, a definition: “The attempt by human beings to operate like computers, often done with the assistance of computers.” It begins by giving us more tasks to do, making each task harder to do, and dimming the mental powers required to do them. It finishes by making us forget exactly how on earth we did them (assuming we didn’t give up, or “multiquit”), which makes them harder to do again.

After the near-fatal consequences of my 2003 decision to buy a phone with a feature I didn’t need, life went on—and rather rapidly, since multitasking eats up time in the name of saving time, rushing you through your two-year contract cycle and returning you to the company store with a suspicion that you didn’t accomplish all you hoped to after your last optimistic, euphoric visit.

“Which of the ones that offer rebates don’t have cameras in them?”

“The decent models all do. The best ones now have video capabilities. You can shoot little movies.” I

wanted to ask, Of what? Oncoming barbed wire? I shook my head. I was turning down whiz-bang features for the first time. “I’ll take the fat little free one,” I told the salesman.

“The thing’s inert. It does nothing. It’s a pet rock.”

I informed him that I was old enough to have actually owned a pet rock once and that I missed it.

From a longer essay that appears in November’s The Atlantic Monthly. © 2007 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Willow Creek looks at what hasn't worked

2007-10-25T12:19:00.000-05:00

The following blog, Out of Ur can be found here.

October 18, 2007
Willow Creek Repents?

Why the most influential church in America now says "We made a mistake."

Few would disagree that Willow Creek Community Church has been one of the most influential churches in America over the last thirty years. Willow, through its association, has promoted a vision of church that is big, programmatic, and comprehensive. This vision has been heavily influenced by the methods of secular business. James Twitchell, in his new book Shopping for God, reports that outside Bill Hybels’ office hangs a poster that says: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” Directly or indirectly, this philosophy of ministry—church should be a big box with programs for people at every level of spiritual maturity to consume and engage—has impacted every evangelical church in the country.

So what happens when leaders of Willow Creek stand up and say, “We made a mistake”?

Not long ago Willow released its findings from a multiple year qualitative study of its ministry. Basically, they wanted to know what programs and activities of the church were actually helping people mature spiritually and which were not. The results were published in a book, Reveal: Where Are You?, co-authored by Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek. Hybels called the findings “earth shaking,” “ground breaking,” and “mind blowing.”

If you’d like to get a synopsis of the research you can watch a video with Greg Hawkins here. And Bill Hybels’ reactions, recorded at last summer’s Leadership Summit, can be seen here. Both videos are worth watching in their entirety, but below are few highlights.

In the Hawkins’ video he says, “Participation is a big deal. We believe the more people participating in these sets of activities, with higher levels of frequency, it will produce disciples of Christ.” This has been Willow’s philosophy of ministry in a nutshell. The church creates programs/activities. People participate in these activities. The outcome is spiritual maturity. In a moment of stinging honesty Hawkins says, “I know it might sound crazy but that’s how we do it in churches. We measure levels of participation.”

Having put all of their eggs into the program-driven church basket you can understand their shock when the research revealed that “Increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more.”

Speaking at the Leadership Summit, Hybels summarized the findings this way:

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

Having spent thirty years creating and promoting a multi-million dollar organization driven by programs and measuring participation, and convincing other church leaders to do the same, you can see why Hybels called this research “the wake up call” of his adult life.

Hybels confesses:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

In other words, spiritual growth doesn’t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.

Does this mark the end of Willow’s thirty years of influence over the American church? Not according to Hawkins:

Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he’s asking us to transform this planet.

Posted by UrL on October 18, 2007

I'm entitled...

2007-10-16T13:47:00.001-05:00

I read an article lately, (I will apologize up front that I don't remember which magazine it was in and I'm not going to track it down...if I do, I won't ever finish this thought) and I've been thinking about it since. I'm not thinking about the subject of the article, which was about the rise of schools limiting the number of college referrals they will write for a student. No, what struck me was the response from the parents quoted in the article. Never mind that some students were applying to dozens of schools, or that the advisers/teachers were spending hours outside of work to complete these forms for the students. That didn't matter to the parents of little Johnny or Sue. (Or more likely, Little Jared and Savannah.) They bristled at the idea that the schools would impose limits on their child's "choices and dreams." The schools who were quoted weren't stripping the procedure down to the bare bones. The schools were talking about limiting th applications to 14 in one case and I believe 20 in another. That doesn't sound like the big, bad principal is stomping all over Junior's life plans. Studies have shown that the shotgun approach to admissions isn't very helpful, anyway. (U.S. News and World Report had articles on this earlier this year.) It's much better to streamline your applications to a half dozen schools, a few of those being safe schools- schools you are sure to get into.

Anyway, back to the parents', and probably students, attitude. There is the prevailing attitude in our culture that "choice" is God. We can't do anyting to limit anyone's choices in life. That seems to be the primary sin of our society. Don't tie me down, don't fence me in and whatever you do, don't limit my choices. Never mind that more choices don't make us happier. Never mind that more choices actually cause greater stress and lower contentment with our eventual decision. Never mind that great choice for me may mean major inconvenience, or worse, for someone else. As long as you don't limit me, I'm supposedly happy. (Read The Paradox of Choice for more information on how more choices don't make things better.)

I was so disappointed to see these quotes by the parents wanting people to work overtime so their child can apply to dozens of schools. What happened to teaching our children to be considerate of others? What happened to self control, putting others before ourselves? And what happened to growing up? The reality is, it's not all about YOU, child. These parents are fostering entitlement mentality in a major way.

This mentality pervades relationships, work situations, marriages, faith communities and more. Don't tell me what to do. Don't limit my choices. Don't make me decide. And if I do decide, then I want all decisions to be reversible. Don't even hint that there is anything permanent here. Permanence limits my choices.

I'm entitled.

Just not in the mood...

2007-10-11T20:59:00.000-05:00

My life hasn't gotten any busier in the last week, but I haven't been spending my free time on the computer. I seem to go in seasons when it comes to my leisure activities. I'll do nothing but read mysteries for weeks on end then not pick one up for several months. Or I'll be so active on the forums I participate in that it takes every free moment for weeks. Lately, I've been reading blogs for hours a day and trying to keep up with forums and email as well. But, like a light bulb, the desire to do anything on the computer just shut off last Friday and hasn't really come back on. I didn't even realize until Sunday afternoon that I hadn't even turned my computer on since Friday evening. I didn't choose to stay off the computer, I didn't even think about it. That's unusual.

I think I'll just go with the feeling. I'm sure in a few days I'll be ready to jump back into the fray, reading and thinking about "the issues" again. But right now, I'm going to read my book, watch TV, read to my daughter, and generally enjoy (finally!!) the fall-like weather we're having!

We're all God's children: more on giving

2007-10-08T18:00:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Jimmy (at Woodshavings), for this video.

Carrie

What is a Charity?

2007-10-08T12:34:00.000-05:00

Here is an article by Robert Reich of the Los Angeles Times about charitable contributions. I was skeptical at first when I just read excerpts in The Week magazine (great weekly mag, btw), but I thought the original piece worth reading. It's not overly long. What do you think?

Is Harvard a charity?

Most donations go to institutions that serve the rich; they shouldn't be fully tax-deductible.
By Robert B. Reich
October 1, 2007
This year's charitable donations are expected to total more than $200 billion, a record. But a big portion of this impressive sum -- especially from the wealthy, who have the most to donate -- is going to culture palaces: to the operas, art museums, symphonies and theaters where the wealthy spend much of their leisure time. It's also being donated to the universities they attended and expect their children to attend, perhaps with the added inducement of knowing that these schools often practice a kind of affirmative action for "legacies."

I'm all in favor of supporting the arts and our universities, but let's face it: These aren't really charitable contributions. They're often investments in the lifestyles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to have too. They're also investments in prestige -- especially if they result in the family name being engraved on the new wing of an art museum or symphony hall.

It's their business how they donate their money, of course. But not entirely. Charitable donations to just about any not-for-profit are deductible from income taxes. This year, for instance, the U.S. Treasury will be receiving about $40 billion less than it would if the tax code didn't allow for charitable deductions. (That's about the same amount the government now spends on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is what remains of welfare.) Like all tax deductions, this gap has to be filled by other tax revenues or by spending cuts, or else it just adds to the deficit.

I see why a contribution to, say, the Salvation Army should be eligible for a charitable deduction. It helps the poor. But why, exactly, should a contribution to the already extraordinarily wealthy Guggenheim Museum or to Harvard University (which already has an endowment of more than $30 billion)?

Awhile ago, New York's Lincoln Center had a gala supported by the charitable contributions of hedge-fund industry leaders, some of whom take home $1 billion a year. I may be missing something, but this doesn't strike me as charity. Poor New Yorkers rarely attend concerts at Lincoln Center.

It turns out that only an estimated 10% of all charitable deductions are directed at the poor. So here's a modest proposal. At a time when the number of needy continues to rise, when government doesn't have the money to do what's necessary for them and when America's very rich are richer than ever, we should revise the tax code: Focus the charitable deduction on real charities.

If the donation goes to an institution or agency set up to help the poor, the donor gets a full deduction. If the donation goes somewhere else -- to an art palace, a university, a symphony or any other nonprofit -- the donor gets to deduct only half of the contribution.

Robert B. Reich, author of "Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life," was secretary of Labor under President Clinton.

A little insight

2007-10-03T19:53:00.001-05:00

My 11th grade son came home with his mid-marking period progress report last Friday. This is his first year in public school after a life of homeschooling, so Will and I were very excited to see how Thomas was doing. His teachers all marked "doing well," and there were only two comments. His English teacher wishes he'd participate more. If she means she wishes he would talk in class, good luck. His Algebra 2 teacher wrote his average: 89%. Honestly, we're thrilled. We didn't know what to expect in math since he's hated it so much the last few years. I happened to mention that it would drive me crazy to be so close to an A and not get it. His response? "I'm glad I'm not you." I had to laugh. He really, honestly, truly doesn't care if he gets 89% rather than 90%, and he won't try any harder just to go for the A. Don't get me wrong, he's not goofing off, and I'm thankful. It's just that he's not exactly busting his tail, either. It's not just that grades don't mean anything to him, it's that he only wants to do what he needs to to get by. It's a mindset.

I can't help but wonder where this mindset came from. Is it nature or nurture? Or both? Did homeschooling contribute to it along with a natural tendency towards complacency? Would putting him in school have sparked a competitive streak?

I was reflecting on those questions this evening and it caused me to think back over my years in school. And I realized something. I was fiercely competitive in many ways, but never really in school. In public school I was often competitive with specific people. In other words, I didn't so much care about my grades as I cared about beating one or two specific people. In college, when the competition seemed more anonymous, my grades actually fell. I only received high marks in "cake" courses (usually courses where my natural gregariousness was an asset, like philosophy) or in my major classes. I got good grades in my major classes because I was engrossed in the material. I loved it so I learned it. But English, chemistry, and math? B's and C's were fine with me.

Thomas doesn't appear to be competitive about much outside of video games. But within the video games, he is very competitive and he takes it very seriously. Someday, perhaps, Thomas will find something else in life he is as interested in as video games. Or else he'll find a way to translate his video gaming into a life.

So now I'm not so worried about his complacency over a B in Algebra 2. He cares enough to do his homework promptly and go to class prepared. That's a huge improvement over the past few years. I have a feeling that this will be a trend.

Blinkers on

2007-09-27T10:25:00.000-05:00

Making the right choices in life should be easier. Don't get me wrong, I don't want every decision in life to be black and white, every crossroad clearly marked, or every choice a slam-dunk. That would be boring. At the same time, it would be nice for a few areas to be less a study in shades-of-grey. Driving horses have often been fitted with blinders , also called blinkers in the horse racing world, to artificially narrow their world and keep them focused on the one path ahead of them. I sympathize.

As I drove home from taking my son to class today I thought again of our present conundrum. He needs a job so he can afford insurance and perhaps save for a cheap car, but he needs a driver's license and access to a car so he can get a job, which requires getting insurance before he gets a job, which we can't afford right now. And that's just my oldest son. I also have a 16 year old son in the same boat, no driver's license, no insurance, no car, no money, no job. In fact, neither of them practice driving because the only car home during the days is my full-size Ford passenger van. We call it Moby Van. I love it but it can be intimidating as a first car. Plus I need it, so the boys can't drive it to work or school even if they did had their license and insurance, which they don't...because they don't have anything to drive. Are you getting this?

Parenting involves a myriad of decisions and choices, and each alternative has it's own fan club complete with scientific research, anecdotal evidence, personal testimonies, and dire predictions about what will happen if you don't choose correctly. Educational options are the same. Even when settled on a course of action, like homeschooling, the choices aren't over. Classical? Unschooling? Traditional? Charlotte Mason? Relaxed? Eclectic? To outsource or not? And then the branching goes on. Which math curriculum? Which science is "the best?" Is Latin essential? What about life skill?

And we won't even get started on the dizzying array of choices for faith and religious belief. Passionate, well-spoken people write volumes defending their point of view. Again, as with parenting, they cite research and history, they quote experts, and share testimonies. But there are passionate, educated, well-spoken people on almost every side of every issue. I find myself in the middle thinking I just don't have the capacity to figure it out. I hold a few foundational beliefs, and try to go from there. But it's more difficult than it sounds.

Several books I've read this year have touched on the these problems. Most notably, Mediated, The Paradox of Choice, and Blink. Though all quite different, they had a synergistic effect on me. We are overwhelmed by information and alternatives, and we are virtually unaware of how we process information and make choices. We don't know when snap judgments are not only good but vital, and when they can be catastrophic. We don't understand how we are reacting to our information-saturated, mediated, orchestrated, "unreal/real," sound-bite world.

A few well-marked paths would be great. A few certified letters from God pointing the way. A child born with a complete instruction manual attached, specific to that one-of-a-kind make and model. An educational alternative that is clearly superior. I don't want much.

I gotta go now. I need to think about dinner, which means I have to push aside all the feelings of inadequacy there..what I'm buying, how I cook it, and what it's doing to my family's health. Blinkers on.

Into not so great silence......

2007-09-23T14:29:00.001-05:00

I've written three or four blog posts recently and deleted them all. They were garbage. My brain seems to be stuck in a sort of infinite loop...I keep coming around to the beginning of things and never getting to the end. There are topics that interest me and that I'm thinking about, but when I blog them... my thoughts just sort of go nowhere.

Okay, so now I've just deleted everything I wrote for this post as well, except for that little bit up there.... Really I have no mind these days.. it's gone to Tahiti. I wish I'd gone with it.

How am I spending my time? Reading blogs...lots of blogs. Most are linked here on the sidebar, but a few I haven't added yet. I'll try to do that today. I'm also watching TV on DVD. Right now I'm working through the NCIS series while I await the arrival of season 3 of Numb3rs. My biggest dilemma right now is whether or not to go on and watch the new season of NCIS without first watching Season 3. Life is tough!

Anything else? Well, I spend a lot of time in the car, where I usually listen to classic rock. Except, of course, when the younger kids are int the car. It's not until you're belting out some song from your youth with kids in the car that you realize, "Wow! I didn't realize how inappropriate those lyrics were!" Sheesh. I'm going to bring my iPod from now on and listen to Teaching Company
lectures or audio books....or my classic rock, only with headphones on.

And, of course, I'm homeschooling the two girls. That usually take a bit of time each day. With my brain away it's a bit more work. Oh, and last night (Saturday) Will and I went to Tylers Tap Room for "Theology on Tap: Beer as a Spiritual Activity" or something like that. It was a thinly disguised excuse for drinking Trappist-brewed Belgian beer while discussing the finer points of hops and malt. Andrew, the liturgist and RCIA Inquiry director at St.Thomas More was the brains behind the operation. He brews beer at home and will use any excuse to promote the spiritual benefits of brewing and imbibing. Gotta love those Catholics. Not being a beer drinker, I sipped some good Australian shiraz and played designated driver. That way Will could feel guiltless about tasting all four brews offered. (Tasting, not drinking full bottles. But the samples were rather generous compared to wine tastings I've been to.) Tyler's seems to have food to match its beer. I look forward to returning and trying more.

Thanks for reading along. I think my brain is due to return from vacation soon. I'll keep you posted.

Randomness 2

2007-09-18T18:52:00.000-05:00

It's humbling when your children don't ask "What's for dinner?" but instead ask, "Are you cooking tonight?"

Have you ever noticed that the cars who cut in front of you are usually new and expensive? What's with that? I drive a 12 year old full-size van. Not only is my van bigger and heavier than those cars, it's worth a lot less.

Speaking of cars, why are the side mirrors on small cars so useless? The mirrors on my van let me back that behemoth into most parking spaces. But the side mirrors on my husband's little Toyota are literally useless for backing. You can't see the road behind you. I end up looking like an idiot every time I have to back that car into a parking spot. "Hey lady, did you order your license from Sears?" Grrrr.

I like to buy books that I never get around to reading...or that I get around to reading next year, or the year after. It's a sickness.

I have a nice video iPod I rarely use. Of course my daughter borrowed it to listen to a downloaded Teaching Company lecture series, so I didn't have it for a while. I need to get back in the habit since I spend so much time in the car.

We spend about $50 a month on cable and there's rarely anything worth watching. It's amazing. Why are we spending that money?

I'm currently reading Mother Teresa's Come Be My Light. I am getting tired of the editor's tendency to interpret everything M.Teresa was saying or going through. I would prefer just to read the letters with some background info and let them speak for themselves. I'm disappointed in the "spin control."

I don't generally wear jewelry. I wear my wedding ring and sometimes my diamond (long story about how rough I am on rings), a watch, and earrings. I love earrings. Some women feel undressed without make-up, I feel undressed without earrings. I actually get upset if I forget to put them in in the morning. I love whimsical earrings more than expensive ones. This summer my daughter made the sweetest dragonfly earrings for me. They look something like this, but they are light green, yellow, and purple, and they hang from their heads instead of their tails.

A life lesson?

2007-09-14T14:20:00.001-05:00

One of the things I'm most selfish about is sharing my good friends. Truth be told, I don't want that other person joining us at the table. I probably only have this one time to be with her this week, and I have to cram in all the important stuff into the time! Of course the stuff is all about me and mine. I want to share what a tough week it's been, or discuss those important matters like "Which curriculum are you using for grammar?" I don't seem to have room in my schedule or my heart to include another. Or to forgo talking all about me and listen instead while my much nicer friend asks the new person questions. She's good, that friend of mine. I can learn lots from her. In fact, from this good friend I've met several more ladies who are now good friends. Of course, at first, they were simply intruders at my table.

There's got to be a life lesson in there somewhere.

The words of Henri J.M. Nouwen

2007-09-11T17:04:00.000-05:00

"How does healing take place? Many words such as care and compassion, understanding and forgiveness, fellowship and community have been used for the healing task of the Christian minister. I like to use the word hospitality, not only because it has such deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also, and primarily, because it gives us more insight in the nature of response to the human condition of loneliness. Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes closed-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.

..Human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process because it forces us to face our own condition in all its beauty as well as misery. When we are not afraid to enter our own center and to concentrate on the stirrings of our own soul, we come to know that being alive means being loved. this experience tells us we can only love because we are born out of love, that we can only give because our life is a gift and that we can only make others free because we are set free by him whose heart is greater than ours. When we have found the anchor places for our lives in our own center, we can be free to let others enter the space created for them and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song, and speak their own language without fear. Then our presence is no longer threatening and demanding but inviting and liberating.

The minister who has come to terms with his own loneliness and is at home in his own house is a host who offers hospitality to his guests. He gives them a friendly space where they may feel free to come and go, to be close and distant, to rest and to play, to talk and be silent, to eat and to fast. The paradox is indeed that hospitality asks for the creation of an empty space where the guest can find his own soul.

Why is this healing ministry? It is healing because it takes away the false illusion that wholeness can be given by one to another. It is healing because it does not take away the loneliness and pain of another, but invites him to recognize his loneliness on a level where it can be shared. Many people in this life suffer because they are anxiously searching for the man or woman, the event or encounter, which will take their loneliness away. But when they enter a house with real hospitality they soon see that their own wounds must be understood, not as a source of despair and bitterness, but as signs that they have to travel on in obedience to the calling sounds of their own wounds....

A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared."

..from The Wounded Healer

I'm not sure exactly what Nouwen is saying, but I keep coming back to this passage again and again. This part especially: When we have found the anchor places for our lives in our own center, we can be free to let others enter the space created for them and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song, and speak their own language without fear.

In another place Nouwen talks about our "center."

"A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identification, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than friends with whom we share the gift of life.

In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and discover the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what we've been given.

In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness."

from Out of Solitude

Any thoughts?

A funny for today....

2007-09-09T17:51:00.000-05:00

There are 10 types of people in the world,
Those who know
Binary,
and those who don't.

Deja vu, all over again......

2007-09-05T18:48:00.000-05:00

I had an odd thing happen to me today. I had a sort of reverse deja vu moment. Instead of feeling like I've experienced something before, I felt like everything was new. I was driving a very familiar road to take my son to his community college classes. He had promptly fallen asleep when we got in the car (he does that a lot these days), and I was driving along listening to the radio. All of the sudden I got the weird feeling. I felt, not like I was lost, but like I was driving roads that I didn't know well. The road, the traffic, the trees all seemed unfamiliar and unusual. Like I'd just moved to this area and it was still new.

The experience left me thinking of what it's like moving to a new place, learning all the streets, finding out where the grocery store is and the mall. It also prompted memories. Memories of when I moved to North Carolina 25 years ago without knowing a soul. I was single, twenty-six and had been divorced about two years. I finished college after my divorce and was fortunate to find a job in my field during the recession of the early 80's. I moved into an apartment, started working for EPA, and learned my way around.

Today I remembered how it felt, driving alone on all the new streets, learning the look of the trees and the shape of the skyline, finding the laundromat, the dentist, the Jiffy Lube. I was starting over, completely, with nothing familiar. In the previous two years my marriage had ended, my best friend moved to California, I'd had to give up my horse, and my dog had died. My dad was terminally ill with cancer and he and my mom were moving to the mountains of NC. There was literally nothing left for me back in Delaware.

I am an extrovert, but my job involved a lot of quiet work, alone in a dark room looking through a microscope. I also spent my weekends alone, often walking the mall, looking and not buying because money was very tight. I did invest in a health club membership because I liked to be active. I usually worked 7:00 am to 3:30 pm, and then I went to the gym for a couple of hours. I did start meeting people, mainly from work, and I visited several churches.

A little over a year after moving to NC, I met a young man at a young adult Bible study. Three weeks later we were engaged, six months later we were married. Over twenty-three years and five kids later we still are. Funny how things work out.

The moment of reverse deja vu passed in just a few moments, but it was fun to walk down memory lane while my 18 yr old son slept in the seat next to me.

Good post from the iMonk

2007-09-02T15:18:00.000-05:00

From the Internet Monk, this great post:

Post-Evangelical and the path to Catholic Spirituality

I wish I'd read something like this two or three years ago. It might have helped me understand how I was feeling.

Those moments that feed your soul...

2007-08-31T07:17:00.001-05:00

There are moments in your life that feed your soul. They are unlooked for, spontaneous, and precious. I had one yesterday.

My 16 year old son is going to school for the first time. He's been homeschooled all his life, as have his siblings. It was his choice, but it has still been a stressful transition, even in a small charter school. Yesterday he came home from school sick with a cold and very tired. He gave me a hug in the kitchen, and then asked me to come sit with him on the sofa.

He sat down close to me, threw his legs across my lap as he stretched out and held one of my hands. We sat in silence for a long time, then he talked quietly about how he was doing, who he was meeting, and how he liked his classes. I teased him gently about the girls he was meeting, and we had a few smiles and laughs. But mainly, we sat close together, connected, quiet, and companionable. We were probably there for 20 or 30 minutes, before he got up to get a snack and start his homework.

When you hold that baby and toddler on your lap, you don't think much about the time when they are too big to fit, or they feel too awkward to "snuggle." It's natural for them to seek comfort in a more "acceptable" or "mature" ways as they get older. But I have to say, it's nice to know I can still make this tired, sick child feel better simply by being there.

More on Mother Teresa

2007-08-30T17:34:00.000-05:00

This is a good essay:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/faith-matters/2007/8/29/mother-teresas-struggle.html

Mother Teresa's Struggle

August 29, 2007 04:52 PM ET | Tolson, Jay

Pre-publication buzz about a book containing Mother Teresa's private writings, Come Be My Light, occasioned an unusually strong burst of media attention last week, including a cover story in Time and coverage on all the major networks. The big news was that the Albanian-born religious who devoted her life to caring for India's poorest and most wretched underwent a long period of spiritual doubt and torment. Beginning in 1948, the year the 38-year-old nun started the Missionaries of Charity, and lasting until her death in 1997, Teresa was haunted by the loss of God's sustaining presence in her life. Struggling through her doubts with various confessors, she learned to accept this painful condition as part of her Christian journey, as important in its own ways as the missionary work that she and other nuns in her order carried out.

At least as interesting as the revelation of Teresa's long spiritual drought have been the varied reactions to it. In addition to surprise and sympathy, many express even greater admiration for the woman who accomplished so much in God's name while feeling a spiritual deadness that drove her close to despair. But it is the reaction of the devout atheists that is perhaps most telling. In the Time article, Christopher Hitchens, a longtime critic of Mother Teresa (see his book Missionary Positions) who is now enjoying considerable celebrity for his no-holds-barred attack on religion, God Is Not Great, compares Teresa to the die-hard communists at the end of the Cold War: "There was a huge amount of cognitive dissonance. They thought, 'Jesus, the Soviet Union is a failure, [but] I'm not supposed to think that. It means my life is meaningless.' They carried on somehow, but the mainspring was gone. And once the mainspring is gone, it cannot be repaired."

To say this was Teresa, or any other believer who suffers what the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross first dubbed a dark night of the soul, is to trivialize the experience of faith beyond all recognition. While many believers have claimed to feel a steady inner presence of the divine throughout their lives, just as many others—and probably more—describe it as a journey or struggle with high, low, and even absolutely arid stretches. Except for those who claim that feeling God's redemptive power is a paramount proof of one's salvation—a criterion emphasized by some Protestants and particularly evangelicals—many lifelong believers have never experienced that felt confirmation of their faith.

For many, the reality of faith is best described by St. Paul: "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," and often that "substance" is as elusive as the wind. Does that mean that their faith is founded on something as demonstrably flimsy as the communist ideal of the "end of history"? Or are the difficulty of faith, its changing and demanding character, and the fruits that it yields in acts of charity possibly the most powerful proof of its value beyond all merely worldly ideals?

Teresa's spiritual struggle may have been painfully long, but it was a struggle felt by most believers in an age of doubt and skepticism. In that sense, it was truly exemplary.

A song for Mother Teresa

2007-08-26T18:43:00.000-05:00

I've been reading about the new autobiography due out about Mother Teresa and her very dark night of the soul. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html For some reason this song popped into my head. I think was the lines about "broken hallelujahs." These are the original Leonard Cohen lyrics. These are the last two verses which are rarely heard now since they were subsequently changed by later artists, but these are the best, imo.
Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

More on fear as a way of life....

2007-08-26T11:59:00.000-05:00

Most people would agree that living in fear isn't a good way to live. Most people probably would say they don't live in fear, but I wonder. As I look around, I see clearly how much of our lives and our reactions are motivated by fear. I only have to look as far as myself.

Years ago I was challenged on this in the context of parenting. Did I parent out of fear? Were my parenting practices geared more toward control than training? That led to some soul searching, reading, praying and long discussions with people from all sides of the issue. My husband and I found we didn't like the way we'd parented, and we slowly made some major changes. Showing real respect for the likes, dislikes and wishes of our children was a good first step. We stopped assuming we knew what was best for them. We started opening our eyes to the fact that too much of our time was spent trying to protect them, and that desire to protect came from fear. We realized that there was only an illusion of control, anyway, so we might as well start living the reality and not buying into the illusion. How many parents are shocked to be the last to find out what their kids are up to? Too many. I learned (well, am learning...not there yet) to listen instead of talk. My "go-to" phrases now are... "Let me think about it." or "Give me a minute." Those phrases keep me from the knee-jerk reaction. Once the almost overpowering impulse to say No is passed, I ask for details and go from there. My kids are patient. They don't yell or press their point. They rarely argue with me. They wait and let me struggle through on my own and believe that reason will usually win. Over the past few years they've learned to trust. When I say No, they may be disappointed, but rarely mad. They know I have good reason.

I still worry way too much about my kids, their futures, their happiness, their grades. ;-) I still fight the urge to protect them- from others, from ideas, from their own mistakes. I spend some hours in quiet agony while they make bad choices I know they'll pay for, telling myself they'll learn valuable lessons from their mistakes. It isn't easy. I hate it, in fact. But I'm seeing benefits.

But fear as a motivator isn't confined to parenting. It drives job choices, clothing choices, housing choices and much, much, more. Fear closes our minds to new people, ideas, and adventures. Fear makes us refuse to question. This is especially true in areas of faith and religion, and it's reinforced by the hierarchy that tells us that to ask questions is a sign of apostasy.

For me, however, I've been much more driven by the fear within myself than the fear of what someone else will say or the fear of being rejected. I've been afraid of losing purpose and meaning in my life if I doubted or feared on faith issues. I've been afraid I'd lose faith, and therefore the thing that has given meaning to my life for 30 years. I'm still scared, but I want to move away from living behind fear to living the questions. Interestingly, since I've dared to ask the questions, I'm less fearful of the very thing that terrified me. I feel stronger, not weaker in my faith. I think that's because faith can't really be "protected." It has to be exercised and exposed in order to be strengthened. So I am, as it were, taking my faith out on walks to expose it to more variety.

BTW- fear of death is still a biggie with me. Anyone else have problems with the thought of their own mortality? I'd love to discuss it more sometime.

Listening as a way of life...

2007-08-18T14:06:00.000-05:00

One of the interesting aspects of learning new things for me right now is that I'm spending most of my time listening and very little of it processing.. at least processing out loud. I've been wondering lately why I have so little to say here, especially when I am thinking about so many things. But I realized that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I am learning more by listening (or reading, in this case) and not so much by interacting. I'm finding I'm not ready to engage in the conversations for the most part. I am just following along. At first I thought it was only because I knew so little about many of the topics, but that's never stopped me before. ;-) But there are more reasons than just ignorance. It feels good to just listen and not have an opinion for once. Usually I wrestle with everything and want the "right" answer immediately. But I'm finding that as I read through several and assorted blogs on theology and Christian life, I am more okay with just letting people have their opinion. More and more, I enjoy reading opinions I don't necessarily agree with, especially if they are well-written and non-polemic.

This altered way of learning certainly has something to do with 8 or 9 years of interacting with a group of women online. We've "sharpened iron" so much we're all bloody from the shrapnel! But this newer method of learning definitely came to the fore when I decided to listen to a friend's challenge that I learn about the Catholic Church from Catholics, not from Protestant debunkers. I took the challenge and started to read the beliefs and practices of the Catholic church and their reasoning behind those beliefs and practices. It's been especially challenging for me to let go of the desire to argue first, listen later. But the habit is growing, albeit slowly, and I'm finding a peacefulness in listening to many voices. I'm finding I can be enlightened, strengthened, challenged and encouraged without compromising my faith. Perhaps, just a little, I'm learning not to live in fear.

A Quick Hello

2007-08-15T21:21:00.000-05:00

My time on the computer has been limited, but I wanted to drop in and wave. Thanks to those still checking up on me after so many long pauses.

When I've been on the computer the past week, I've been spending much of my time reading Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog. (See sidebar for link.) He is hitting on many points I'm thinking about right now, including the New Perspective on Paul and the search for the historical Jesus. Scot has a clear, concise, non-polemic way of presenting ideas for discussion. I'm being a lurker there since I don't have much background in what they're discussing, but I'm learning by listening.

I've been thinking about Mary, the mother of Jesus, too. Today is the solemnity of the Assumption of Mary in the Catholic Church. I don't know yet what I think about all the Marian doctrines of the RCC, but researching the reasons behind them has left me with profound sense of how little Protestants think of this remarkable woman. I think we can all assume one thing, Jesus loved his mother perfectly, not just as her savior, but as her son. She is the Ark of the Covenant carrying the Word of God. She is the Tabernacle where God dwelt for a time. Think about how holy God is. Isaiah couldn't stay in His presence without the angel coming to "clean" him with the hot coal. Just a glimpse of God's back made Mose's face shine so brightly he had to cover it before Israel. This God dwelt for a time inside Mary. That just had to change her forever. I may not understand it all, but perhaps we skip too easily across "All generations will call me blessed," and "Hail Mary, full of grace."

And blessings to all of you!

Changed my template....

2007-08-11T12:42:00.000-05:00

...the green was getting to me. Look okay? Distracting? Not distracting?

If you have any preference, let me know. I want the blog to be easy to read....you know, easy on the eyes.

Thanks!

Blue Like Jazz

2007-08-11T12:17:00.000-05:00

For NoVa Dad.

Here are a couple of reviews:

From Publishers Weekly
Miller (Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance) is a young writer, speaker and campus ministry leader. An earnest evangelical who nearly lost his faith, he went on a spiritual journey, found some progressive politics and most importantly, discovered Jesus' relevance for everyday life. This book, in its own elliptical way, tells the tale of that journey. But the narrative is episodic rather than linear, Miller's style evocative rather than rational and his analysis personally revealing rather than profoundly insightful. As such, it offers a postmodern riff on the classic evangelical presentation of the Gospel, complete with a concluding call to commitment. Written as a series of short essays on vaguely theological topics (faith, grace, belief, confession, church), and disguised theological topics (magic, romance, shifts, money), it is at times plodding or simplistic (how to go to church and not get angry? "pray... and go to the church God shows you"), and sometimes falls into merely self-indulgent musing. But more often Miller is enjoyably clever, and his story is telling and beautiful, even poignant. (The story of the reverse confession booth is worth the price of the book.) The title is meant to be evocative, and the subtitle-"Non-Religious" thoughts about "Christian Spirituality"-indicates Miller's distrust of the institutional church and his desire to appeal to those experimenting with other flavors of spirituality.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description

"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. . . . I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened." In Donald Miller's early years, he was vaguely familiar with a distant God. But when he came to know Jesus Christ, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. Within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God. In this intimate, soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey back to a culturally relevant, infinitely loving God.

When I read Blue Like Jazz it was simply different from anything else I'd read before. I haven't read Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, buy many people say they have a similar feel. Miller himself says he patterned Blue Like Jazz on Lamott's book. He was taken with her honesty and openness. Blue Like Jazz was my first experience with anything resembling "emergent" or "postmodern" in the world of Christian thought and practice. It was like a breath of fresh air to me. I agree with the Publisher's Weekly review that Miller sometimes gets simplistic and introspective (read "naval gazing"), but it was well worth the read. I've bought several copies for friends, and as high school graduation presents.

Miller has the first chapter in .pdf on his site: http://www.donaldmillerwords.com/resources.php

Let me know what you think if you decide to read it!

Confessing sin

2007-08-08T14:23:00.001-05:00

As Christians, we seem to be pretty comfortable with sin. I might even say we go so far as to keep it like a pet and show it around, so that everyone knows we "take sin seriously."

"Yeah, I know I'm a sinner! Just like Paul..wretched man that I am!! See? I got sin right here. I can even cry on cue."

Don't get me wrong. I think sin is our constant companion, whether we want it to be or not. We sin because we are sinners. A life of righteousness is a struggle. But I still wonder if we aren't too comfortable with it. We talk about it so much, we preach sermons on it, we gossip about the sins of others, we deny it, we tsk tsk about it, we pray and pray for relief from it, and we genuinely cry over it. But there it is, like a big lump in our laps every time we sit down.

I wonder if our obsession with sin has anything to do with our relatively easy life. I somehow suspect that living at a subsistence level leaves little time for naval gazing. "Each day has enough troubles of its own." (Matt. 6:34) Hard work has a way of helping heal the pain of having sinned, too. At least I think it does. Hard work makes it a lot easier to think of yourself as worth something, as useful, as having a purpose. No wonder the Proverbs warns us against idleness. Not only does idleness give us opportunity to sin, but it gives us too much time to dwell on it afterwards. Dwelling on sin can cause a sort of fatalism that, in the end, can make sin harder to resist. "I'm no good. I can't help it. I've tried to do better, but I can't!"

This all leads to why I think the Catholic Rite of Reconciliation has real, solid, life-and-blood merit. It does two things. First, it gives us a place to put that lump that's been on our lap. You go and you unload it...all that sin. You confess it, out loud to a living, breathing person. That takes some guts. I think privately confessing it to God is easier, even if it shouldn't be. That might be another example of our level of comfort with sin, by the way. Anyway, there you are giving up this lump and going away without it. It's not yours to think about or talk about anymore. It's a done deal. Stop dwelling on it.

Secondly, a real, live, flesh-and-blood person assures you of God's forgiveness, out loud. You don't think that makes a difference? How many times have you confessed the same sin to God because you don't feel forgiven? It can be argued that confessing sin to another person is the way it should be done. (James 5:16) I think this is for accountability, to be sure. But it's mostly because 1) we need the prayers of righteous people and 2) we need to hear we are forgiven. We are relational creatures, which is why God sent his Son in the flesh, to walk and talk among us. Jesus was (is) personal, and that's something we can relate to.

But maybe we're so comfortable with sin that we're a little scared of what it would be like to walk away from confessing and be completely free of it, even for a short time. It reminds me of a character in Lewis's The Great Divorce, who couldn't give up their little sin, and stayed in hell instead of choosing to be free of it.

And have you read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller? At one point he and his friends set up "Confessionals" on their campus, only they didn't hear the confessions of others. No, they quietly confessed their own sins to each person who sat down. I bet that was a freeing, even exhilarating, experience.

I hear that whether or not I join the Catholic church, I can go to confession. That sounds good to me. Someday. I'll get around to it I'm sure. But not right now, the sin is asleep on my lap, and I'd hate to disturb it!

Benevolent Leader

2007-08-06T08:38:00.000-05:00

Hmmm....I'm not so sure, but this is what the test said. Below is the pretty little box of colors and a link to the site so you, too, can spend time finding out who you are! I couldn't get the description and the pretty little box in the same post. I'm not sure how I got this given my answers, but I'm sure the test is accurate! (Yeah, right.....)

You are a Leader

Your solid grounding in the practicalities of life, along with your self-assuredness and your willingness to appreciate new things make you a LEADER.

You're in touch with what is going on around you and adept at remaining down-to-earth and logical.

Although you're detail-oriented, this doesn't mean that you lose the big picture. (I'm not very detail oriented!)

You tend to find beauty in form and efficiency, as opposed to finding it in broad-based, abstract concepts.

Never one to pass on an adventure, you're consistently seeking and finding new things, even in your immediate surroundings. (Not so sure about this. I don't know that I'm very adventuresome!)

Because of this eagerness to pursue new experiences, you've learned a lot; your attention to detail means that you gain a great deal from your adventures.

The intellectual curiosity that drives you leads you to seek out causes of and reasons behind things.

Your confidence gives you the potential to take your general awareness and channel it into leadership. (I think I like following better than leading!)

You're not set on one way of doing things, and you often have the skills and persistence to find innovative ways of facing challenges.

You are well-attuned to your talents, and can deal with most problems that you face.

Your independent streak allows you to make decisions efficiently and to trust your instincts

You prefer to have time to plan for things, feeling better with a schedule than with keeping plans up in the air until the last minute. (This is very true of me!)

Never one to be found in chic boutiques or trendy clothing stores, you take an extremely practical approach to getting dressed. (Yeah..it's called boring.)

If you want to be different:

There's more to life than the practical - take some time to daydream and explore the aesthetic sides of things.

how you relate to others

You are Benevolent

You are a great person to interact with—understanding, giving, and trusting—in a word, BENEVOLENT

You don't mind being in social situations, as you feel comfortable enough with people to be yourself.

Your caring nature goes beyond a basic concern: you take the time to understand the nuances of people's situations before passing any sort of judgment. (Well, this is how I'd like to be. Not there yet.)

You're a good listener, and even better at offering advice.

You're concerned with others at both an individual and societal level—you sympathize with the plights of troubled groups, and you can care about people you've never met.

Considering many different perspectives is something at which you excel, and you appreciate that quality in others.

Other people's feelings are important to you, and you're good at mediating disputes.

Because of your understanding and patience, you tend to bring out the best in people. (My family might say otherwise!)

If you want to be different:

You spend a lot of time taking care of others, but don't forget to take care of yourself!

Sometimes you can get overcommitted, and when you sacrifice spending time with those close to you, it can make them feel unimportant.

Personality DNA

2007-08-06T08:28:00.000-05:00

Benevolent Leader

Maybe it's not all about ME...

2007-08-03T09:21:00.000-05:00

I think my blogging experiment might be coming to a close. I've learned some really valuable lessons here, and even had a few insights that might be worth reading. But overall, I've found out the limitations of blogging more than the opportunities.

One of my first posts was called A Bloggers Uncertainty Principle. In it I explored the fact that blogs have limitations. Part of the limitation is that it fixes things in time. By that I mean as we react to real people through our blog, we freeze them and their actions or words in time, thereby not allowing for them to grow and change as "real" people do. An associated limitation is the fact that blogs are often public, and therefore expose our thoughts to a very public audience. What we say can wound others, even when we don't mean to. It is limiting when you start thinking about who is reading along and what you really don't want to say "in front of" that person, who might take it wrong.

But today I'm thinking about another limitation that, for me, is much worse than the others. Blogs don't really off much dialog or discussion. It isn't the nature of the beast. Most of my computer life has been spent on forums, where discussions were the name of the game. The give and take of years of interactions have truly shaped who I am today. I'm better educated, more compassionate, less judgmental, and more open minded, for example. It's been difficult and stressful at times, but immensely rewarding. Blogs don't allow for that, and because of that, blogs are much less likely to be instruments of real change for the blogger. Blogging is the consummate MeWorld.

I find I am growing tired of MeWorld. I don't like just reading someone's opinions, and having no way to discuss them with the person. My experience is most bloggers don't like to be challenged, at least not on their blogs. That is the their place, a place to present themselves to the world. It is not really about discussion. I want discussion, even painful, stressful, challenging discussion. I've decided I'll take that over safety any day. Right now in my life, those kinds of discussions are only going to take place in real life.

So the fate of my blog is undecided. I'm not a person who likes to journal about my life. I've never kept a diary. This blog has never been about what my family is doing on a weekly basis. In fact, none of my extended family even know I have a blog. This blog has been about what I'm learning or thinking, mostly, and lately I haven't been posting what I'm thinking, for various reasons I won't even go into. But mainly, I wonder if the exercise is even helpful or healthy. Maybe it's not about me and what I'm thinking and feeling. Maybe it's about someone else. Maybe it's time to get out of MeWorld and into the life God has for me.

A great rant...

2007-08-02T11:35:00.000-05:00

Follow the yellow brick road...or in this case, just follow the links. My friend Jimmy posted this link on his site, Woodshavings (see sidebar for link). I encourage you to read this post by the Internet Monk. He links the posts he's commenting on. Okay, that's a lot of reading...but well worth it, imo!

I don't seem to have much worthy to say these days, so I'm happy to pass along the insights of others.

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/riffs-072807-brant-hanson-and-celebrity-sinners

Spending money....

2007-08-01T08:05:00.000-05:00

I don't know enough about both sides of the issues to join in on discussing whether "big box" retailers and chain stores are good or bad for America. I have a feeling it isn't as simple as good or bad. More likely they serve a real purpose, which is why they have flourished, and in doing so,they've caused some damage as well. I don't think "small and local" is inherently better than "big and national." But, as I said, I don't really know enough to make a judgement.

But one point did come up in a recent discussion that I think it worth pursuing. How in the world did we become such a consumer based culture to begin with? Perhaps the most important question to ask are not whether "big box" is bad, but whether our society's mindset of continual accumulation of stuff is the real problem. I'm not talking about buying food or essential clothing. I'm talking about all the other stuff we buy, almost daily. I've started being aware in my own life how much "stuff" enters the house in a week's time. Clothes, bedspread, sheets, shoes, books, magazines, deodorant, video games, DVD's, CD's, stuffed animal, pens, ice cream, cookies, milkshake, fast food, nail clippers, coffee, 1000 paper plates, storage containers, etc. The list goes on.

Of course, for most of the list I can argue we "need" the item. I don't want to go without deodorant (or let my sons, for that matter), and I'm sure coffee is essential to my mental health. But when did we get to the place that we simply expected all these things in our lives?

Our national pastime isn't baseball or Nascar, it's shopping. WalMart didn't happen in a vacuum. It filled a "need." Whether as a social outing in the mall, or at the computer, we spend a lot of time spending money. Why is that, and how did it happen?

A continuing journey...

2007-07-29T21:50:00.000-05:00

At the Saturday Vigil Mass Will finished an 18 month journey by joining the Catholic Church. It was a beautiful mass, and we were blessed to have all our children there to experience it with us. It made me smile to look down the pew and see them all sitting there, from oldest to youngest. I was so proud!

There were four people joining the church that evening. Will was the last to get anointed with oil, and Father John obviously figured he might as well dump the remaining oil from the horn on him! The scented olive oil ran down his face and even managed to sneak under the towel provided. For the rest of the evening, Will smelled faintly of olive oil and roses and his collar was stained darkly with the excess oil. He was well and truly anointed.

Will's sponsor was also our RCIA director and now good friend, Andrew. During the Eucharist, Andrew guided Will directly to Father John for his first communion in the Catholic Church. It was an emotional moment for Will, something he'd been looking forward to for months.

Afterwards, Will and I, along with out youngest daughter, went to a party given by the family of one of the new members. The food was wonderful and the company even more so. The Catholic church we attend is very large, but we are finding a community within the community, and the fellowship is good.

Right now our family will relax and enjoy being together on Sunday mornings again. Will and I will mostly go to Saturday evening Mass, or perhaps very early Sunday morning. Then we will join our children for worship at Grace. We will continue to be a "two-church" family...or a three-church family if you count our occasional forays to the church where our friend is the pastor (see Woodshavings link at right). In the fall when I get a handle on life, I may go back to RCIA Inquiry and restart the path myself. But for now, I am happy to be an observer, and happy to be sitting next to my husband in church again. Life is good.

Sometimes we get it right.....

2007-07-26T12:34:00.000-05:00

Here are some pictures of GraceMart. Every year our church community processes thousands of donations of clothing, toys, food, furniture and more, and gives it all way...for free. Last night, the GraceMart served 410 people. Today volunteers are at the church processing hundreds of new donations to make them available tonight and tomorrow night. Although I took 7 big bags of clothing over there two weeks ago, I'm ashamed to say I forgot about GraceMart during this busy week. I meant to go over and work. That's what I get for not putting it on my calendar. But even if I forget, God doesn't. He's faithful...and in his faithfulness, hundreds of people in our area will be blessed with free clothing, food, and furniture.

http://www.enjoymore.net/gallery/gracemart/index.htm

Reviews of Mediated

2007-07-24T09:44:00.000-05:00

I know some of you are rolling your eyes, but be patient with me. My friend 15Minutes wants to know more about Mediated, so I decided to post some reviews. BTW, 15Minutes...you'll like this book.

From Publishers Weekly
In a deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense style, de Zengotita posits that since the 1960s, Americans have belonged to a culture of reflexivity, and the media in all their forms have put us there. We're bombarded from childhood with so many images putting "us"—the individual person—at the center of the universe that we cannot help thinking that this is where we belong. We live in a Times Square world, says the Harper's contributing editor, and thus we become the ultimate Descartesians: media think only of us, therefore we think only of ourselves. The result of this self-centeredness is that we become increasingly numbed by the bombardment of images and, in a variation on the "if a tree falls in the woods" query, we can no longer imagine our premediated lives. Media imagery has given us an omniscient perspective—we can be on the grassy knoll, by the Twin Towers, on the beach as the tsunami hits—while never having to incur the horrors of being there. "Mediation" inevitably closes us off to the unmediated world, home of those victims of the tsunami whose lives are hideously hard and where no media put them front and center. This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe. (Mar. 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
De Zengotita's style is both reflective and sardonic as he delves into the ways the media has shaped our individual reactions to modern culture and events. Influenced by the media-inspired "culture of performance," we now live our lives as if we are performers practicing method acting, he maintains. We go through the motions of expected reactions to everything from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Princess Diana's death to documentaries of the Kennedy assassination and the civil rights movement. The Internet, satellite television, and a host of technological products and services now give us the impression of participating in current and historical events to such an extent that we can barely distinguish the varying levels of what de Zengotita categorizes as ranging from the real-real to the unreal-real. Analyzing car commercials, cell-phone usage, the social art of teenagers, and other aspects of modern culture, with keen detail and wit, de Zengotita offers an amazing look at how media affects our culture, our choices, and our responses to our media-filtered lives. Completely absorbing, amusing and insightful. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

What I'm up to....

2007-07-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

What have I been doing? Well, obviously not blogging. And if you saw my house, you'd know I haven't been concentrating on housecleaning, either. But I haven't been completely worthless, either. Here is what's been going on in my life:

My oldest son (18) was involved in a drama camp last week. They take a full length play (in this case You Can't Take It With You) and put it together in one week. They only accept the exact number of people needed for the parts and it's a first come- first served basis. That means you don't weed through hundreds of people to get "the best." They assign roles the first day and then the actors spend the week memorizing lines and blocking scenes. They go from 9 to 4 daily, with the performance on Friday evening. While the play didn't have a completely polished look, it was absolutely amazing! The lead characters had hundreds of lines and did them flawlessly. The timing was great and the audience was roaring with laughter. I can't believe they can do this in five days. this production company is run by two 18 year olds and they've been doing it for three years! For this play they had an adult with theater experience help, but they've put on some amazing plays with just their own experience to go on, including the student version of Les Mis and The Diary of Anne Frank. The fee for participating is $90.
My 10 year old daughter is in the drama camp this week. She has a small part in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She's a little disappointed not to have a larger role (she is only in one scene), but she's handling it well. This play has almost all younger kids, so they only go from 10-4 daily. The performance is Friday evening. I forgot the camera for my son's play, but I'll try to post some pictures of my dd's.
I've finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. Don't worry- no spoilers here. I stood in line to buy it at midnight, but I'm afraid I didn't enjoy the experience much. I didn't end up at one of those fun parties I keep seeing pictures of. I ended up with over 1000 people standing in line outside of a B&N for over an hour. I was chained to this line of people, not able to move or I'd lose my place, listening to some of the most insipid and, at times, vulgar conversations. I would not do it again. However, the book is great.
Last week I had a real life encounter with friends. It was wonderful! Several lady friends of mine ended up at the pool with their kids, and without their husbands, all at the same time one evening. Several of us had brought some dinner, and all five of us, with our 16 of our children (there would be 24 children between us if they'd all been there), ate together. The five ladies talked and laughed for hours until the pool closed. The kids (ages 4-16) swam, played games, ate snacks, and had a great time. Later that evening I told Will that this is what I'm craving. An "in real life" group of friends who love and accept each other. We were not a homogeneous group, and a couple of the ladies hadn't really spent much time together before that night, but the atmosphere was one of acceptance and caring. I guess you can say we "clicked." Everyone else must have felt it, too, because they ahve all said something to me about how "renewing" that evening was and how they want to do it again real soon.
I'm still reading Blink and finishing Mediated. I took the weekend off to read and reread Harry Potter, though. I've also started My Life With the Saints by James Martin, SJ.
I've been watching movies more recently. I'll post my list at the end of the month.

Well, that's only a partial look at my life right now. I am still thinking thoughts, just not able to put them into words right now. thanks for reading. ;-)

I'm rated PG!

2007-07-12T14:25:00.001-05:00

I've mentioned death twice and kill once...although i though I had mentioned sex, too, in the last post. I should have a PG-13!!

Thanks to Jimmy at Woodshavings: http://jchalmers.blogspot.com/

What is your blog rated? (Click on rating box to go to the site.)

Randomness....

2007-07-12T13:45:00.000-05:00

I'm having adult-onset ADD symptoms and can't seem to develop a though into a blog-length post, so here's a random set of thoughts:

Read Mediated by Steven de Zengotita. I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating. This is a very important book and anyone who reads and writes blogs will be interested in what the author has to say. Stick it out past the first chapter. Your patience will be rewarded. (Thank you Alton Brown.)
In recent weeks I've read the first three books of a fantasy series that has some borderline "horror" elements, such as vampires, werewolves and the like. The author is Jim Butcher and the series is called The Dresden Files. Overall they are pretty good, although a bit, well, bloody and all. But I realized I was feeling a bit depressed and it finally dawned on me that the books weren't helping my outlook on life. That's happened to me before with a few mystery writers. Elizabeth George has a well-written series about Detective Lynley. They've made some into BBC Mystery! shows. I read many of the books, starting at the beginning, before realizing that I was feeling weighed down. There was this obligation to get and read the next book in the series, and I admit the series is well-written, but it was depressing to read about the sad and tangled personal lives of the main characters. I finally stopped reading them, and although I wish I knew what happened, I can't face the descriptions of missed chances and miscommunication between people who should know better. I'm affected by what I read.
I'm affected by what I watch. My favorite shows are detective/crime dramas. (Do you see a trend here?) But I can only watch so much of shows like CSI before I realize I'm becoming paranoid to leave my house at night! Well, that's a overstatement, but you get the picture. I love the detective work of mysteries and crime dramas, but there is TMI about perversity and evil, and too many pictures of dead bodies...up close and personal. Even the "lighter" crime dramas like NCIS and Numb3rs can get to be too much, especially when it comes to sex crimes. Again...TMI.
I am surprised at how petty people can be, and ashamed that I can act the same way. Insecurity often comes out as judging others who do things differently. I pray God just helps me love people, and that He helps others love me when I'm being a pook.
I want to know why laundry, food related jobs, and (very) limited housecleaning can take so much of my time. It's like having a newborn and wondering how something so small can take every waking moment. Yes, I waste time, but still.....
My son is leaving Saturday for Peru. It has already been an eye-opening experience for him. After leaving the Travel Health Clinic with a sore arm and several prescriptions for malaria prevention and such, my son had a revelation. "We're amazingly safe here in the U.S., aren't we?" Yellow fever, typhoid fever, malaria and such are the stuff of history lessons to him. He's now getting the idea that people all over the world still live, and die, this way. This isn't National Geographic Channel.

It's not much, but....

2007-07-08T13:19:00.000-05:00

...we got some doors finished. Exciting, huh? I'm sure your pulse is racing from the rush of adrenaline. ;-)

Well, my pulse isn't exactly racing (except from exertion, maybe), but I am pleased. We got back from a great five days in southeastern VA visiting family on Thursday. On Friday morning, Will and I wen to the local hardware store (privately owned "small" business...in case you're keeping track) and bought supplies. We then decided our teen boys (16 and 18) really did want to know how to use the palm sander, so we volunteered them to help. I took charge of the painting detail which included my 10 yr old daughter. My 13 yr old daughter somehow managed not to get involved. We're still trying to figure that one out.

Over the next day and a half, we worked in 95 degree weather to sand, scrape and clean the doors, and then prime and paint them. At first we tried prepping them outdoors and painting them in situ, but that was a bad idea. It's impossible to paint a door correctly when it sits on carpet, even with a drop cloth. There is no way to keep the paint from getting all over the drop cloth as you paint the bottom edge of the door. I had paint all over me by the end of the day.

The next day we tried a different tactic, one that took longer but made for easier painting and a nicer end product. We painted the doors outside while they were on sawhorses. That meant one side at a time, and it was s-l-o-w, but they looked nicer. It also meant I was outside working instead of inside. I don't generally mind the heat, so I was okay. In fact, during one painting stint the outside AC unit cycled off and stayed off for the entire time I was outside. After a few minutes I realized that I was hearing birds singing, and kids playing and laughing on the next street over. It was quite relaxing and made me smile. I kid you not...as I took the last swipe with the paint roller, the unit kicked on. I felt like God had given me a 30 minute reprieve from noise, and I was thankful I hadn't brought my iPod out with me!

So I have 9 freshly painted doors in my house. I eventually need to do 9 more, including two sets of louvered doors, but we made a start. Something on my to-do list got done. It makes a difference in my whole outlook on life! :-D

I'm sure I'll make the time to get it all done...

2007-06-30T18:13:00.000-05:00

It's the end of June and I feel like I haven't accomplished much with my summer so far. I keep waiting for things to slow down so I can get something done around the house, but "slowing down" isn't happening. Our "regularly scheduled" events finished at the end of May, but somehow "not so regularly scheduled" events have more than filled up our time. I keep waiting for the down time that obviously isn't going to happen. Or at least, isn't going to happen unless I make it happen.

The pool has been open since the end of May, but we've been once in three weeks. That's nuts. Part of that was a week of on-and-off stormy weather, but not recently. Recently it has been driving one child one place and one child another. Or going out of town (or getting someone else ready to go out of town). Or just keeping up with house, laundry, and groceries. (Oh! But I actually have cooked this week...four days in a row! ) I feel like I'm going to scream if I can't get some "summer" done around here, but at the same time the kids seem somewhat restless and want to spend their summer time doing something!

Oh, I did do one thing for myself last week. I spent almost half of one day trying to find clothes that fit me. No luck. That's a different post altogether. Spending the day shopping did not make me feel refreshed. Nor, unfortunately, did it make me feel like I got anything done.

What is it I want to do this summer? Well, I want to spend time at the pool with my kids and friends, I want to read a few good books, I want to watch a few movies, I want to organize books so I know where things are when school starts in the fall, and I want to finish the upstairs work we started last summer. The work in the house is the most involved, requiring sanding of all the doors, priming and painting, and painting all the trim. We need to replace the carpet and the floors in both bathrooms, but money may not hold out for that this year. Maybe next year.

How am I going to make it happen? Well, as soon as I get back from my trip this week, and get my son ready for a mission trip to Peru, and drive my other son to his drama camp, and my daughter to camp, and get ready for my son's girlfriend to spend sometime with us in August, and plan next year's biology class, and help the person who is taking over my Life Science class, then I'm sure I'll find the time to watch those movies and read those books and, oh yeah, do all that sanding and painting! :-D I love summer!

See y'all after the Fourth! Happy Independence Day!
Carrie

Romantic nostalgia

2007-06-28T09:10:00.000-05:00

We all do it. We romantize the past, demonise the present, and proclaim prophet-like doom on the future. Even the most entrenched modernist and post-modernist gets caught in the trap of "tsk, tsking" about the state of things and wishing to bring back some aspect of the past, sure that that was better than this.

If only we had Mom-and-Pop stores again, serving us within walking distance, knowing our names and asking after our children! If we could walk to work! If only we didn't make such a large "footprint" on our environment!

The problem is, we tend to overlook how we've individually benefitted from all thes changes we say we hate. We also tend to over-simplify the answers, over-demonized the busineses involved, and maybe we even use our indignation to stop further action. We can feel good about not shopping certain stores without looking very deeply into the whole picture.

What's the whole picture? Let's first look at where we live. Let's say I move out of the suburbs so I can grow some of my own food and look at something other than my neighbors yard. Great, right? Well, yes, as long as I don't then travel two or three times as far to do the things I need to do, thereby burning all that fossil fuel. How much have I shrunk my environmental "foot" if I'm now traveling two or three times as far to buy groceries, go to the doctor, go to church, visit friends, see a movie, or take my kids anywhere, or better yet, to avoid the local big-box demon?? Hmmm.

Or say I start buying fruits and vegies at the local farmer's market. For me, that's a 20 min drive as opposed to a 5 min drive to the grocery store, where I'm going to go anyway for the other things I need. And, of course, the farmers have all driven in to set up their stands. Okay, so the food hasn't traveled from California, and I agree that's a good thing. But it isn't totally benign, either. Most of these farmers have traveled 30-70 miles to get here, usually in trucks or vans. Add the gas from all the vendors and gas from all the customers, and....well, you do the math. Add to that that I will pay almost 2x the price for the vegies and fruits and, economically speaking, it's not a slam-dunk.

Don't get me wrong, I try to go as many Saturday mornings as possible. I enjoy it and the food is good. But I'm not going to pat myself on the back or think I'm making some socially meaningful choice here. Personally meaningful, perhaps, but socially? Questionable.

Yes, I think big agribusiness has a major problems, but let's change the bad laws, not demonize the industry. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking we are living more morally because we don't buy Pop-tarts. It's much more complicated than that. And to be socially meaningful, you need to do more than eat locally. You need to look at what the poor and working poor really need from us and go from there. I'm not sure they'd thank you for undermining the flow of convenient and inexpensive foods. Not many poor/working poor are buying at the farmer's market, even though they live the closest to it. Part of that might be lack of education on health and nutrition, but the majority of that is economics.

And lets look at housing. Where do most of us live? We probably live on what was once farmland. We enjoy our house and our neighborhoods, but perhaps lose sight of the fact that cows once pastured there, crops grew, or small furry animals frolicked int eh woods that once flourished. Someone plowed under paradise so we could have a house. Not only that, they plowed under paradise so we could have relatively inexpensive houses. Now, tell me, why are we so upset when we see more developments going in? Do we want to horde for ourselves the right to own a house? Or to work in a prosperous area which attracts even more people to live there? I don't like to see the woods cut down any more than the next person, but let's face it, who am I to say the landowner doesn't have the right to sell, or the builder to build, or the buyers to buy and raise nice little families there? Isn't that what I want? Just because the farm that was plowed under to build my house happened 40 years ago doesn't change the fact that it happened, and I'm benefiting from it.

Of course I could move farther out, but we've covered some of the environmentally unfriendly aspects of that already. And we could also cover the needs of the poor here. Remodeling cute little craftsman homes isn't an option for them. Moving out to the country isn't either in many cases. We may feel virtuous fighting another housing (or shopping) development, but let's be honest about who we're helping here. It's a little like banning CFC's an denying the developing countries access to cheap and efficient refrigeration just because we can afford the more environmentally-friendly expensive stuff.

I haven't even gotten into the whole big-box, little-box, chain store aspect. Let me just say Ikea is a big-box chain store. How do you think they can offer the good deals? Because they're nice people?? Oh, and can someone explain why I should pay 50% more to support a local business that can't buy in bulk and can't employ more than a few people and probably can't afford to give them any benefits at all? Just because they exist?

And that leads me to why we have all these large stores....they save us money and we like that.

Just in case you think I'm a total troglodyte, I was in Asheville, NC this past weekend and enjoyed walking around the downtown with my extended family. Asheville is a unique and enjoyable town, in part because they allow very few chain stores or restaurants in the downtown area. I like that. You get unique shops and interesting restaurants. You also get very expensive shops and restaurants. Asheville can do that because the base population in the area has the money to support the stores. that isn't going to work in most towns because the people that need to be served by the downtown shops can't afford it.

There are many problems that are better dealt with by looking forward and shouldering the challenges, not by looking back and wishing we could turn back the hands of time. Better food supply, a hard look at farm subsidies, better education on nutrition and food, perhaps tighter controls on junk food, perhaps better laws on zoning and urban sprawl.

And let's remember, we've all benefited from the low cost of living our uniquely American economy has produced. It's not perfect, but it got this way for more reasons that just shady politics. Our economy got this way because it gave convenient, low priced goods to millions of people across a huge geographical area. It got this way because, for the most part, it's worked.

The unreal real...

2007-06-24T20:18:00.000-05:00

In his book, Mediated, Thomas de Zengotita talks about the overload of information and compares it to "The Blob." It swallows all the sharp edges and reduces things to soundbites and 15 second video clips. It lives on reflexitivy...making everything about us. We are all like method actors in our own lives, and in the lives of others. We deal with 9/11 or Katrina or the VT shootings by being so supersaturated by constant barrage of information that we must deal with it in a way that dulls the edge of the realness, the pain, and discomfort. One way to do that is to make real events unreal and live events non-live. We see video clips of the World Trade Center collapsing and we watch a movie by the same name. We see "live" video coverage that happened in the past, so it's not not technically "live. But it is...but we detach. It's a movie, no, it's real...and the movies are more real than the live TV. I'm confused, are you? The Blog has rounded the edges and absorbed the thing outside it. The event is covered, analyzed, dissected. It becomes representational. And the Blob moves on to the Next Event that can be absorbed.

Of course we know the difference. When we think about it. When we take the time to separate how the real and the unreal effect us dozens of times a day. When we think about it and analyze what we are seeing and feeling. But in the mix we usually don't.

We can't get outside The Blog, so it's hard to really look at. It's the state of our world. Watch The Queen, and you see our mediated world in action at the death of Diana. The people became part of the play. Reflexivity ruled the day. We are part of the action, the purpose, the meaning. The mourners took control and wrote the script, and the Death of Di becomes an Event-Story. The Queen capitulates to the nation of mourners who were taking the Event-Story and making it as much about them, their grief, as about Di.

Read the book. It doesn't provide "answers." There are no answers. There is reality, and we need to be aware of what our world is really like. It's a very interesting world!

Teens and books- a great post....

2007-06-18T11:54:00.000-05:00

Please take a look at this post on Teen Literacy Tips on nicksenger.com. (Nick runs another blog I read regularly called The Literary Compass.)

The Bookcase in the Sky: A Morality Tale for Teen Literacy Teachers
http://www.nicksenger.com/blog/

The Literary Compass
http://literarycompass.blogspot.com/

Friends

2007-06-13T14:11:00.000-05:00

For the past, oh, six or seven years I've spent most of my "socializing" time on the computer building a community with a couple dozen other women, mostly on one forum. I know I've mentioned that before, and even blogged a bit about friendships, online and otherwise. I'm about to do it again....blog about friendship, that is. So if you're sick of the topic, skip this entry and pray I have a brainwave in the next day or two and post something you find more interesting. Otherwise, read along while I try to figure out how relationships work.

While I've been building a virtual community, I've had surprisingly limited sustained contact with "real" people. I have two friends I see and talk to regularly, and then a small group of friends I chat with at church or when dropping one or another child off at an activity. There are several women/couples I enjoy and have sometimes said I'd like to know better, but I rarely follow though. Quite frankly, I haven't really wanted to make the time investment. Having a couple (with children) over for dinner means not just the dinner, but all the cleaning and straightening that goes with it (and in my house that's a daunting task at times). Our house is a moderate size and rather full. There isn't a great place to have people visit, especially since our family room pretty much is taken over by computers and a TV that is there more for Xbox than actual viewing.

But the physical inconvenience is only part of it (although a big one for me right now....but that's a different blog). The big commitment is the emotional one. Getting involved in someones life takes time and energy. Time is a premium with me and energy is even more precious. I find that with kids, homeschololing, teaching, being a friend/spouse, running a home, and dealing with pre-menopausal issues, I am simply tired a lot of the time these days. But part of it is not the physical tiredness, it's the tiredness that goes with being around people all the time. People and clutter. I feel like my senses never get a rest. There is always sound and sights and people and demands, or not even demands, just desires...children's desires to be with me, to talk to me, ask me questions, seek my input, share a funny story, or have me kiss away a bad day. I wouldn't trade it, don't get me wrong. I don't want sympathy because I have a house full of people I love. Far from it. It's just that I realize that I don't have much left for the rest of the world. And for a life-long extrovert, this is a new experience.

Perhaps this is why I've loved the online community so much. My extroverted need for people and expression is at least partially fulfilled, and yet I can fit it into my time, at least most of the time! Yes, there have been challenges, sadness, loss, conflict and more. No relationship, irl or online, is without the challenges that make the relationship worthwhile. But online relationships, at least for me, have been somewhat easier than the face-to-face ones. Why? I'm not real sure.

Yesterday I spend a nice day with a friend going through her room of homeschooling material helping her sort, cull, and organize. I didn't convince her to get rid of much, but at least it's more organized and she knows what she's got on her shelves. We had time to talk about a lot of things, and friendships were one of them. Her experiences have reminded me why I haven't felt the energy to pursue more irl friends. It can be daunting.

I want uncomplicated friends. Uncomplicated in that they are secure in who they are and who I am. I don't want people to be possessive of me or my time. I don't want friends to get hurt because I chose to vacation with this family or go to lunch with that friend. I don't want to be a friend like that, either. I want to be kind to people , and not worry about who is talking to whom, or if I'm getting enough attention from anyone in particular. I've made a lot of mistakes as a friend. In fact, this lady I was with yesterday and I have a long, and not always happy, past. But we've grown and learned from mistakes, and probably that's why we ended up talking about it all yesterday. We don't have any pretenses with each other any more. We've pretty much seen the worse and we've forgiven and moved on. Some days I'm so glad to be 50+ and not 25!!

I feel like I'm re-entering the local "friend" scene after years of self-imposed hermit-hood. I'm already wondering of it's worth it. The renewed contact comes with having children who are more involved socially and can't really be avoided. However, few people around here know me as well as my online community of friends. As I navigate the local minefields of relationship, I am ever more grateful for the very real bond I have with so many here in cyberspace.

I hate ivy

2007-06-05T11:19:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd share with you how much I hate ivy. It's nothing more than kudzu with a good publicity agent. It grows over anything, destroys siding on your house, refuses to die, even when sprayed by all those chemicals I never admit to using in my yard, and it refuses to be pulled it without a herculean effort!

Did I say I hate it? I've been trying on and off for 10 years to rid my yard of ivy. Anyone who plants ivy on purpose should be shot. No trial. I have almost given myself heat exhaustion and who-knows-what-else today trying to pull up the ivy along my north wall.....again. It had grown six or seven feet under the siding of the house. It is separating the siding from the outer wall, and it has invaded the crawl space through the vents.....10 or 12 feet into the crawl space. Why? I don't know. It's dark in there. Ivy is stupid and it just grows. It doesn't know how to do anything else. Just grow. Up walls, under walls, through walls, into crawl spaces, over fences, over other plants, over any toy or gardening tool left for more than 10 minutes. I worried about the children when they were small. My kids have never been very active, and I wondered if they staying in one place too long if I would ever find them again.

I wish I had taken pictures of it before and after. Only I'm not to the "after" stage yet. I'm in the almost after stage, which is where I've been for years. I hate ivy.

Further thoughts on yesterday's blog...

2007-06-04T10:22:00.000-05:00

My blog yesterday was sort of long and rambling, and went "off point" more than a few times. That's partly the way my mind works and partly because I was interrupted numerous times and the TV was on. :-D

I don't have a problem with the concept of "home church." I understand the desire and even the need for a community and support network, as well as a place where people help you grow in your faith and stay accountable (although "staying accountable" is a nebulous term which I'd like to explore deeper someday). My question is, why is there this concept that the only right way to "do church" is to be anchored in one, and only one, group of believers? Maybe there is huge scriptural support for it, but I don't think there is, at least not direct support. I honestly think it is a child of the Reformation. Before that, for good or ill, you were a member of the "church universal."

I'm not saying everybody needs to go worship at multiple churches. But I am suggesting that there is something amiss with the mentality that makes not belonging solely to one church body somehow wrong or even sinful. Yes, it can be a challenge to form community at more than one church, and not everyone is going to want to even try. At the same time, it's not impossible to do. And, to be perfectly honest, attending a single church for years doesn't guarantee community. A person , or family, may make friends and enjoy attending church functions yet still not really establish that sense of community or belonging. It's happened to us more than once. It can, in fact, be very difficult at times to break into an established church community.

Our family has attended Grace for almost 7 years. Even though we know people, we've taught Sunday School, Will was a Youth Leader for 4 years, and I've been active in other ways, we struggled to feel like we have a real community there. We don't see anyone outside of church functions except one family. Sure, we could have been more involved and made a bigger effort, but with five children and homeschooling, I didn't have the energy. In the past year, our situation has changed, and interestingly enough, I've become more involved at Grace even as we've widen our circle to include Saint Thomas More. I'm doing more with the Moms at Grace and my children are getting more involved in church groups and activities.

Our community at STM is different. We'll more than likely meet people as we join in their many outreach functions or special groups (like the JustFaith group for social justice or the group that studies Catholic doctrines in depth). Our closest group of friends there at the moment are the other RCIA members and the RCIA director and his wife.

The third church we are associated with is a small group of led by a dear friend of ours. It has a "church without walls" feel to it. We are behind this group because we believe in what they are doing, which is putting legs on the gospel of Christ. Faith is doing, not just speaking, and they believe in doing. The church is going to find ways to meet the needs of the poor in their community, even if they don't know how they're going to do it yet. For example, they are dedicated, through networking with other believers and agencies, to feeding a set number of children this summer who would otherwise go hungry without the school lunches they receive during the year. Our semi-regular attendance (probably only once every month or so) is because we love the people and want to be involved in what they are doing, even if our physical involvement is limited due to time and distance.

Lastly, about regular Sunday attendance. I think there are many benefits to regular church attendance. It is a pre-set time when many people get together, therefore making it an ideal opportunity to regularly connect with those people at one place and in a relatively short period of time. That's a huge benefit in our busy lives. Also, it's a time to be exposed to the same thoughts and therefore be able to discuss and interact on those common experiences. Sort of like being on a forum together and all reading the same book or watching the same movie. But worthwhile as it is, it isn't the only way to get regular fellowship with other believers. Right now my future son-in-law works almost every Sunday, so his fellowship of believers consist of our family and the CD's of sermons he gets from his church back in Oregon sometimes. However, his limited exposure to "church" doesn't mean he isn't growing or getting fellowship. Ideally he'll work out a schedule and be able to plug in somewhere someday, but until then, he isn't an apostate or a backslider, nor is it that he doesn't care, as many assume.

I hope these thoughts help clarify my meaning. It's a fun topic to think about!