Piggybacking

I’ve been toting around this idea that we are more human the more we are redeemed.  Before we are redeemed, Franz Wright would call us monsters.  And today I was reading Thomas Merton and found this:

These missions [knowing God and becoming like Christ] begin at baptism.  But they do not take on any practical meaning in the life of our spirit until we become capable of conscious acts of love.  From then on, God’s special presence in us corresponds to our own free decisions.  From then on, our life becomes a series of choices between the fiction of our false self, whom we feed with the illusions of passion and selfish appetite, and our loving consent to the purely gratuitous mercy of God.

You should read the whole of chapter 6:  “Pray for Your Own Discovery.”  There is a phenomenal prayer toward the end.

Another reason to cultivate community:

Speaking of the protoevangelium:

What picture does this passage show us? The human being does not trust God. Tempted by the serpent, he harbours the suspicion that in the end, God takes something away from his life, that God is a rival who curtails our freedom and that we will be fully human only when we have cast him aside; in brief, that only in this way can we fully achieve our freedom.

The human being lives in the suspicion that God’s love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God.

He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God’s level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into emptiness, into death.

Love is not dependence but a gift that makes us live. The freedom of a human being is the freedom of a limited being, and therefore is itself limited. We can possess it only as a shared freedom, in the communion of freedom:  only if we live in the right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom develop.

We live in the right way if we live in accordance with the truth of our being, and that is, in accordance with God’s will. For God’s will is not a law for the human being imposed from the outside and that constrains him, but the intrinsic measure of his nature, a measure that is engraved within him and makes him the image of God, hence, a free creature.

If we live in opposition to love and against the truth – in opposition to God – then we destroy one another and destroy the world. Then we do not find life but act in the interests of death. All this is recounted with immortal images in the history of the original fall of man and the expulsion of man from the earthly Paradise.

Dear brothers and sisters, if we sincerely reflect about ourselves and our history, we have to say that with this narrative is described not only the history of the beginning but the history of all times, and that we all carry within us a drop of the poison of that way of thinking, illustrated by the images in the Book of Genesis.

We call this drop of poison “original sin”. Precisely on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring and that something is missing from his life:  the dramatic dimension of being autonomous; that the freedom to say no, to descend into the shadows of sin and to want to do things on one’s own is part of being truly human; that only then can we make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and women, of being truly ourselves; that we should put this freedom to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in reality, fully ourselves.

In a word, we think that evil is basically good, we think that we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the fullness of being. We think that Mephistopheles – the tempter – is right when he says he is the power “that always wants evil and always does good” (J.W. von Goethe, Faust I, 3). We think that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even necessary.

If we look, however, at the world that surrounds us we can see that this is not so; in other words, that evil is always poisonous, does not uplift human beings but degrades and humiliates them. It does not make them any the greater, purer or wealthier, but harms and belittles them.

This is something we should indeed learn on the day of the Immaculate Conception:  the person who abandons himself totally in God’s hands does not become God’s puppet, a boring “yes man”; he does not lose his freedom. Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great, creative immensity of the freedom of good.

The person who turns to God does not become smaller but greater, for through God and with God he becomes great, he becomes divine, he becomes truly himself. The person who puts himself in God’s hands does not distance himself from others, withdrawing into his private salvation; on the contrary, it is only then that his heart truly awakens and he becomes a sensitive, hence, benevolent and open person.

The closer a person is to God, the closer he is to people. …

–Pope Benedict XVI

Sharing the Table

Here are some reasons we should be inviting people over for dinner:

1. It gets you out of your menu rut.  Tasting the menu from another kitchen makes me realize that there are other things to eat besides the same old same old.  I get used to eating a box of green beans and almonds 4 days a week.  {yawn}  After feasting with several different families this week, I’ve had shrimp, vegetable quiche, strawberry and pecan salad, brussel sprouts (cut in half, drizzled with oil, pepper, then havarti cheese…who knew?  delish), and so on.  Even if what you are serving seems mundane to you–it’s probably not to the people you are serving. 
2. Hospitality encourages community in a way that our culture neglects.  We don’t like to admit that we need each other.  We don’t want other people in our business.  We don’t want to be accountable for those around us.  This makes me think of a line from our Anne of Green Gables production this spring.  When Marilla is vying to send Anne back to the orphanage, she asks Matthew what good that orphan would be to them.  To which he humbly responds, “We might be some good to her.”  Hospitality encourages us to open our homes to the people around us.
3. Hospitality encourages generosity.  I think Miss Manners has said, ”Generosity and gratitude go hand in hand.”  When we think of how many blessings we have, the godly–and perhaps most human–response is to share them.   
4. Hospitality encourages beauty in everyday living.  Let’s face it.  Your living room is not ready for a Martha Stewart photo shoot every day of the week.  And you probably don’t eat on the fine china each night of the week.  But when you have guests over, it’s fun to add some aesthetic quality to the meal you serve. 
5. Hospitality, specifically inviting others to eat with you, echoes Christ’s hospitality at the eucharist.  So much more happens at the dinner table than merely consuming 600 or so calories for our bodies to convert food to energy.  We get energy to work–but so much more.  As a hostess, we share our lives with our guests.  We contribute to the community that shares Christ with the world around us. 

So, one of my goals this summer is to make a conscious effort to share with others the blessings God has given me and build community in our fractured world.

Cinco de Mayo!

I found this in my drafts.  I offer you this today, even though it’s ocho de junio…which does not sound like a holiday at all. 

In honor of the Mexican independence, I give you a couple stories about David. (He is Costa Rican, so you pronounce his name Dah-veed.)

Episode #1: Linda
I met David one evening, and he asked for my phone number. I’m sure Theresa spurred me on to give it to him, and then he said, “I’m sorry, what is your name? I forget.”

Well, Theresa gave him a hard time about that one. So I didn’t have to. The next morning, I got a text message that read, “Buenos dias, Linda.” I was irrate. It is one thing to forget someone’s name when you first meet them. It is another to ask, get made fun of for forgetting, and then forget again and use the wrong name in a direct address. ooo I was hot.

I steamed all of this to my dear Lauren, and she did not seem steamed at all. I rephrased what happened. She said something to the effect of, “Well, he’s hispanic.” And I can’t see what that has to do with him calling me by the wrong name. Lauren responds, “Well, you’re pretty.” What does that have to do with anything? The point is my name is not LINDA! Lauren, as cool as a cucumber just informs me that linda means pretty in Spanish.

oh.

Episode #2: You like me.

David and I went to dinner at TGIFridays. We waded through Spanglish all night in order to communicate. And towards the end of the meal, he looks at me seriously and starts the following conversation (please read all the DAVID parts with a Latino accent in your head):

DAVID: I just want to know. …You like me.
ANNA: um. I think you are nice. I mean, I don’t really know you that well. But I think you are nice.
DAVID: No, eees not a question. You like me.
ANNA: Right. um. Yes, I like you, but like I said, I don’t know you all THAT well. But I do like you.
DAVID: No, no, no.  eees not a question.  You don’t have to say anytheeeng.  [Add the appropriate gesture, with an open handed point to you and me]  You like me.
ANNA:  yeah.  Like I said I know, I like.  But …  I’m just saying…
DAVID:  [exasperated] No.  Eeees not a question.
ANNA:  ok.  You are saying, [pedantically slowly, keeping the chosen gestures] “You like me.”   yes? 
DAVID:  YES!
ANNA:  [smiling] ok.  All I’m saying is that I–[suddenly realizing that Dahveed is making a declaration of like--only he has his subject and object transposed]

Episode #3:  Back off.

I had seen David twice, maybe three times.  And he was very affectionate.  I understand that culturally Latin Americans are more touchy than Northern Americans, but I couldn’t handle it.  Also, he would make extravagant love claims, either with a sweet name (mi amor) or in Spanish.  (saying he loved me in Spanish…or maybe I just had my subject and object mixed up)  So I tried to explain to him that those words mean something different to the both of us.  I mean, you just can’t go around saying you love someone when you very first meet them.  And he was trying to explain how I was the most amazing woman in America (Has he met most of the women in America?  How does he know?) and the differences of our cultures and how it wasn’t that big of a deal–whilst incessantly touching my right limbs.  Since he wasn’t taking my suggestions, I was clear and frank:

ANNA:  [removing his hand from my knee]  You can. not. touch. me all the time.
DAHVEED:  [looking wounded] I am not trying to make sex with you.  I just—

And I don’t know what else he said because I was trying not to laugh at his mixed up idiom.

Thank you, Josh.

Josh introduced me to Franz Wright. 

Today I read God’s Silence in one sitting.  It was like having a conversation with someone who opens his mouth only to have his soul sit on his lips.  I’m kind of exhausted.  but exalted. 

Franz would be proud.  In his poem “Poet’s Room in a Museum” he writes, “Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it–”

I’ll let the pros review this book of poems.  I’ll only react:  Often in the beginning I was offended at Wright’s banality and pretended I could not identify with this recovering addict.  But as I kept reading, the moments of clarity (in, for instance, “The Hawk,” “The Heaven,” “Text & Commentary,” “Petition,” “The Walk,” “The Fire,” “Why is the Winter Light,” “A Successful Day (Fill in the Blank)”) created sublimities that I wanted to share. 

Just this morning, I had one of  those experiences at church in which the Infinite spoke to me.  But I sounded moronic trying to explain that experience to another person.  Wright deftly captures those soul-lifting moments and makes them contagious  in this collection of poems.

Say Anything

My friend, John, asked me to come sit for his art class.  The class consists mostly of lovely, older women.  One of the lovelies said as I first assumed my statue state, “I woulda thought you’d a done something really great with your hair today.”

My Philosophy of Education

THE GOAL OF EDUCATION

Isocrates, perhaps the father of the trivium, asserts that our ability to persuade others and communicate our desires sets us apart from the animals.  Our ability to come together and devise cultural norms is distinctly human and uniquely a result of the power of speech. 

For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things honorable and base; and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another.  It is by this also that we confute the bad and extol the good.  Through this we educate the ignorant and appraise the wise; for the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul.

In Antidosis, Isocrates views his educational goal as patriotic.  While he labored to touch the souls of his students in order to make them good citizens of Rome, we must strive today to make strong citizens for the kingdom of God. 

Mature and active citizens of God’s kingdom love wisdom and seek the honorable and lovely throughout the entirety of their lives.  Kingdom citizens submit to the reign of Christ in every aspect of their lives.  We recognize the importance of allowing the gospel to activate and empower our knowledge to change our own lives and the culture in which we live.   

THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF EDUCATION

The fundamental elements of Christian education are summed up beautifully by John Milton Gregory as “the Seven Laws of Teaching”:

(1) a teacher who knows the lesson to be taught; (2) a learner who attends with interest to the lesson; (3) a common language used, a medium between the teacher and learner; (4) a lesson to be mastered that uses the known to explain the unknown; (5) teaching that arouses the learner to use his mind to grasp a new idea or truth; (6) learning that is the process of a pupil thinking a new idea or truth into his own understanding; and (7) review and application of the ideas and truths communicated.

 

THE AUTHORITY IN EDUCATION

Authority is the right and power to command, instruct, and direct.  As citizens of the kingdom of God, all authority is His.  God has instituted the church and family to cultivate children to become godly citizens.  A family can not raise a fully developed child, ignoring religion.  Each family tacitly proclaims their religious beliefs through their lives.  Deuteronomy 6 gives families the responsibility to diligently teach their children.  However, the context seems less like transferring knowledge and more like sharing the legacy of the Christian culture.  Parents are commanded to teach the moral law and Christian principles when they sit in the living room, when they walk around the neighborhood, when they lie down to sleep, when they rise to greet a new day, and all the opportunities to find Christ in between. 

 

Professional educators partner with parents in order to educate and cultivate a culture of Christ, always acknowledging the parents’ God-given responsibility to raise children in the nurture and counsel of God. 

 

THE METHODS OF EDUCATION

From the ancient days of Isocrates, students were educated in what would later be codified as the trivium.  Throughout history, children have learned according to the method of classical education until John Dewey asserted his new antics in the beginning of the twentieth century.  As a tried and successful method, the trivium has produced the great minds of Aristotle, Pythagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, John Locke, C. S. Lewis, and virtually every other person involved in the great conversation before 1950. 

 

The trivium includes three stages:  grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  The grammar stage is the first and most basic.  During this stage, a student learns the basic language of a subject and all its vocabulary.  Students learn the very basic methods of memorizing while young:  singing, chanting, and repetition, repetition, repetition.  While accumulating the facts of a subject, the student provides a foundation for the next stage, logic. 

 

The dialectic, or logic, stage takes the stored knowledge of various subjects and begins to organize it in a meaningful way.  This necessitates formal logic training but also accompanies the stage of development in which children begin to demand logical explanations for knowledge rather than a simple fact.  Organizing knowledge and beginning to learn how to define something through logic adds strength to the child’s knowledge and confidence in truth. 

 

Finding truth is not the ultimate end of education though.  Rhetoric is the culmination of the stages of learning.  Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, requires students to find ways to make their arguments for the truth attractive.  This includes poetry and higher sciences and wisdom in addition to the artful construct of logical arguments.  Rhetoric also forces students to recognize that their lives are the most potent of the persuasive powers.  Isocrates, along with countless other rhetoricians, acknowledge the power of ethos, or personal character, in the attempt to persuade others:  “…[A]n honorable reputation not only lends greater persuasiveness to the words of the man who possesses it, but adds greater luster to his deeds, and is, therefore more zealously to be sought after by men of intelligence than anything else in the world.”  Because people believe people, not disembodied ideas, rhetoric demands that we be the kind of people worth believing—people filled with the power and wisdom of the gospel. 

 

THE PERSONALIZED APPROACH TO EDUCATION IN LIGHT OF THE ABOVE

As a believer of the gospel and the ideas asserted above, I have no small task in showing the next generation the wonder and grace and knowledge of God in all creation.  In the classroom, I must lovingly show the power of the gospel to students who do not believe they can master themselves or the subject at hand.  I see the classroom as a training ground for life in which discipleship is the counterpart of academics. 

Girl Disappointed in Love

by Karol Wojtyla

With mercury we measure pain
as we measure the heat of bodies and air;
but this is not how to discover our limits–
you think you are the center of things.
If you could only grasp that you are not:
the center is He,
and He, too, finds no love–
why don’t you see?
The human heart–what is it for?
Cosmic temperature.  Heart.  Mecury.

Guess who Karol Wojtyla is.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

by Alexander McCall Smith

READ IT! 

If you know you won’t read it, read these pieces I pulled from this book to add to my commonplace book. 

In a very short time, he knew, there would be men wanting to marry her.
  He would never deny her that, of course.  But what if the man who wanted to marry her was a bully, or a drunkard, or a womaniser?  All of this was possible; there was any number of men like that, waiting for an attractive girl that they could latch on to and whose life they could slowly destroy.  These men were leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman’s heart until it was dry and all her love had been used up.  That took a long time, he knew, because women seemed to have vast reservoirs of goodness in them. 
  If one of these men claimed Precious, then what could he, a father, do?  He could warn her of the risk, but whoever listened to warnings about somebody they loved?  He had seen it so often before; love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults.  you could love a murderer, and simply not believe that your lover would do so much as crush a tick, let alone kill somebody.  There would be no point trying to dissuade her.
 
 
…nothing, nothing, that was what her country was so rich in–emptiness.
 
She made it sound so simple that he found himself convinced that it would work.  That was the wonderful thing about confidence–it was contagious.
 
…they [lawyers] set themselves up as experts on everything.  What did they know of life?  All they knew was how to parrot the stock phrases of their profession and to continue to be obstinate until somebody, somewhere, paid up.
 
She did not like his voice.  It was sandpaper rough, and he slurred the ends of the words lazily, as if he could not be bothered to make himself clear.  This came from contempt, she felt;  if you were as powerful as he was, then why bother to communicate properly with your inferiors?
 
Women can’t be bothered with all this fighting.  We see war for what it is–a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.
 
Mma Ramostwe smiled at her old friend.  You can go through life and make new friends every year–every month practically–but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years.  Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
 
There was so much suffering in Africa that it was tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away.  But you can’t do that, she thought.  You just can’t.

I VOTED

Did you wear your sticker?  Did you get free stuff?  I went to an election party Tuesday night, and people started talking about all the free stuff you could get by flashing your I VOTED sticker.  Krispy Kreme donuts, Starbucks coffee, a Chick-fil-A sandwich.  That’s all I caught, but there were more suggestions. 

Well, since I had to go home and grade 9-wk. Latin translations, I left the party early.  I went by Krispy Kreme on my way home, and beamed at the girl behind the counter, “I voted!” while pointing at my sticker.  The girl just looked at me.  So I added, “Are you all giving away free donuts to people who voted?”

“No, we ran out.”

“Wait. What?”

The girl informed me that they had run out of the free donuts. 

“But there are myriads of donuts behind you.  I mean, a donut is a donut, right?”

“No.  The free donuts had blue icing with patriotic sprinkles.”

Not wanting to be that customer who complains about not getting something free–when in reality I didn’t even want a donut before I heard they were free–I just said, “Oh.  That’s disappointing.  Have a good night.”

And left.  Then I convinced myself that I should get *something* free, since all these places were offering.  I mean, at least there are still celebrating the privilege and responsibility to vote and not succumbing to all this voting is against my conscience bs.  I rerouted my way home and stopped by CFA.  Not the 9-Mile store, the cash cow on Bayou. 

I walked in and tried again, beaming anew, “I voted!” 

And the girl just looked at me.  You have got to be kidding me.  So I let her know what I had heard:  about their giving away free sandwiches today.  She huffed, like she was practicing breathing out for the doctor holding a stethescope to her chest.  Finding some words for her, I asked, “Is that not true?” 

“I could give you a free drink.” 

“No, that’s ok.  I just had heard that you guys were giving sandwiches–”

She had turned the manager and in a quite accusatory tone informed her, “This lady wants a free sandwich because she voted.” 

Now, now.  Wait just a second.  I was not demanding anything.  I was just investigated these allegedly free sandwiches.  Which I assume they are not…

The manager filled me in, “Somehow it got out on the internet, but CFA did not approve that.  Some states are doing that.  But not us.”

“Oh.  ok.”

…And since Starbucks was right next door, I had to find out if that was a hoax too.  I didn’t go inside.  I just got to the drivethrough.  And since they have that camera in the DT, I showed my sticker.  “I voted.  Are you guys giving out free coffee?”

“Yes.”  oh good!

“Do you still have some free coffee left?”

“Yes.”  oh good!

“Awesome.  I’ll have a cup of free coffee.  with cream please.  oh wait.  I’ve been hearing about this salted carmel cocoa.  May I have that instead?”

“Sure, but that’s not free.”

“It’s ok.”

“ok.  $3.68″

I pulled up to the window, and found a kid with an I VOTED sticker as well.  Voter and I were making small talk about voting, and he informed me that they actually were giving coffee away to anyone who asked, since the legal department informed them that they were actually bribing people to vote by giving coffee.  And some people just don’t believe in voting.  Some people can’t vote.  So it’s not fair to give only voters free coffee. 

WHAT!?  This is ridiculous.  So I start getting on this soapbox about people not voting, and about patriotism, and relaying the story about KK and CFA, and some guy comes up behind Voter, and whispers in his ear.  Voter’s face fell.  “I am so sorry.  We just ran out of that cocoa.  I’ll give you a refund, and you could have anything else.” 

I figured it was a sign.  “eh.  No worries.  I’m glad you voted.  Have a good night!”

ps.  I was not the only one who heard of the free stuff.