The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 11-5

This fifth installment concludes Chapter 11. Chapter 12 will focus on Walter.

***

Ognes, France. September 9th, 1914. The stone row house in which the officers of 6th Battalion were quartered was narrow, just one room across. The two lieutenants who were the only remaining officers of 23rd company were sleeping in the sitting room, which made up the front half of the ground floor, and so Henri was seated at the table in the back room, which served as kitchen, laundry and dining room all in one. By the gently wavering light of a kerosene lantern he sat staring at the piece of stationery on which he had written the date, the name of the town and then: Monsieur Dupuis,

He wanted nothing more than to follow the example of so many other officers and dull the day’s exhaustion with enough cognac to assure a dreamless transition to deep sleep. Yet it would not become any easier to write to Lieutenant Dupuis’s father as more days passed, and if he himself were wounded or killed, the father might never receive word of his son’s last days. Surely he was owed that much.

And yet the blank paper lay in silent challenge. What could it benefit a father to hear?

I was with your son the moment he stood up in a moment of brave thoughtlessness and a German bullet blew fragments of his skull and brains into the grass.

Rejoice! With such a great hole blown in his head, your son cannot possibly have felt the wound that killed him. He did not even twitch when he hit the ground.

“My God.”

He mouthed the words and his conscience could not tell if it was a prayer or curse. Pere Lebas’s lenten retreat came back to him: sitting next to Philomene in the church back in Chateaux Ducloux each Friday night as the priest delivered his talks on the last words of Christ. But when Christ had called out “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” had He done so in the spirit of transcendent prayer which Pere Lebas seemed to imagine, or had He done so in the full, human horror of suffering and blood, of tormented body and despair?

What would Rejol say about those words after these last few days?

There was a knock at the kitchen door, and Henri escaped the blank sheet of stationery to answer it.

A staff car with dimmed lights was idling in the narrow alley, and on the step stood a Lieutenant Colonel, his uniform clean and crisp, his brass buttons gleaming even in the dim light against the blue-black expanse of his uniform tunic.

“What can I do for you, sir?” Henri asked, conscious of the grubbiness of his own uniform after two days in the field.

“I was told the officers of 6th Battalion were quartered in this house. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I am Lieutenant Colonel Lemoine, executive officer of the 104th Regiment. I don’t believe we’ve met, Captain.”

Henri recalled the short officer with his reddish hair and precisely trimmed beard from the regimental maneuvers the last time the reserves had been called up, a year before, but it was no surprise that the active regiment’s second in command did not remember all of the officers in the attached reserve regiment.

“Captain Fournier, sir. 22nd Company, 6th Battalion.”

“Ah.” The Lieutenant Colonel looked Henri up and down. “Well, you’re the man I’m looking for, Captain Fournier."

[continue reading]

2005 Revisited

Going through the archives, I find that we wrote more posts between June and December of 2005 that we did in any whole year since 2009. Ah, youth! If you have a few minutes, here are links to some of the best ones, along with selections to whet the appetite:

"Darwinist" Dangers

Readers have probably caught on by now that I consider the theory of evolution to be the best current theory we have concerning biological origins of species on this planet (one tries to be careful and avoid phrases like "believe in evolution"), but it struck me this gets to some of the discomfort that many Christian parents have with allowing schools to present evolution to their children in science class.

Leave aside, for a moment, the question of what the history of life on earth actually is. Clearly, someone who believes that science can demonstrate that God created the world and all life on it via a miraculous event has less room to lose his faith in God than someone who believes that life on earth developed via a natural process -- but that God created the universe and the laws of order that allow it to be a welcoming place for life on earth. The more direct you think the evidence of God's hand in the universe is, the less room you have to doubt God's existence. (Now, if God had given us all "Child of God" birthmarks, we'd really be set...)

Legends of the Fall

One of the things that strikes me, however, is: If the suffering resulting from an earthquake or a hurricane is somehow the result of the fall, what would things have been like had man not fallen? Would there simply be no earthquakes of hurricanes or disease? And yet (unless you're the most literal of young earth creationists) the Earth and the physical processes that make it work were formed long before the fall. There could be a world without hurricanes and earthquakes, but it would be a world that worked a little differently than our own. So unless you want to posit that the physical nature of the Earth changed with the fall (an idea that I think Aquinas would certainly have rejected, since it is as incompatible with Aristotelian natural philosophy as with modern science) that leaves us to wonder what natural disasters would have been like had man not fallen, and why they would have existed at all.

In the past, I've toyed with questions about how perhaps natural disasters would have occurred, but man's reaction to them would have been radically different, because man would not have had the inherent fear of death and lack of trust in God that fallen man has....

But here's another thought: To what extent was the nature of the universe changed because of the fall of the angels?

The Eternal Now

Maybe it's the result of growing up on Science Fiction and then reading Augustine, but one of the things I latched on to tight when I ran into it in college was Augustine's reconciliation of God's foreknowledge with Man's free will. In City of God XI, 21 Augustine says:

"It is not with God as it is with us. He does not look ahead to the future, look directly at the present, look back to the past. He sees in some other manner, utterly remote from anything we experience or could imagine. He does not see things by turning his attention from one thing to another. He sees all without any kind of change. Things which happen under the condition of time are in the future, not yet in being, or in the present, already existing, or in the past, no longer in being. But God comprehends all these in a stable and eternal present.... Nor is there any difference between his present, past and future knowledge."

Why must God experience things in an eternal present? Allow me to play wannabe mathematician for a moment.

The Desire to Bear Arms

If you do not experience it yourself, I am not sure I can explain to you the hold that knives, guns, bows and all things dangerous hold upon my mind. The bow, of course, is a noble instrument, dating back farther in our history than writing, rice pudding or income tax. Guns are perhaps no more pleasurable to use than bows, but they infinitely more fascinating, since they combine the joy of a complicated yet elegant mechanical construction with noise and destructive power.

Sickbed Revisited

(With apologies to Evelyn Waugh and, of course, all of you.)

She talked to herself, because hers was the only voice she could trust, when it assured her that she was still alive; what she said was not for the children, nor for any ears but her own.

"Better to-day. Better to-day. I can see now, across the expanse of the living-room, the fibers of the carpet, faded and grey, where yesterday I was confused and took the floor for a repository of broken toys and stuffed animals. Soon I shall see the tabletops and couch and know where it is that the ants get in.

"Better tomorrow. We live long in our family and talk early. Three is no age. Julia is only two and can remember where her candy is hidden and how much of it I ate, her 'tandy'; that was the name they had for it in the nursery and in the back-yard where unlettered girls have long memories. You can see where the big weedy shrub used to stand: the corner of the yard where the fence is uneven and half the grounds are waste, nettle and brier in hollows too deep for filling. We dug to the roots to hack it out and lay the foundations for the rose-bed planter. Those were our roots in front of the new house when the men in the orange truck came to cart them away to the dump .

Miss Marple and the Case of the Superfluous Lesbians [Due to the magic of Google, this is actually one of our most read posts of all time.]

This is something I've been mulling over for a few weeks, but I was prodded into writing by seeing Steven Riddle address the same issue (hat tip: Happy Catholic).

Mystery, the ever-popular series on PBS, recently ran a set of four new Miss Marple mysteries, all based on books that I'd read years ago. (I went through an Agatha Christie kick in my early teen years and churned through most of her works.) The four mysteries were Murder at the Vicarage, A Murder is Announced, What Mrs. McGillicudy Saw, and The Body in the Library. Murder at the Vicarage (barring the odd flashback sequences) and What Mrs. McGillicudy Saw were substantially the same tales I remembered. A Murder is Announced had some slight differences, and the denoument to The Body in the Library was so drastically unlike anything Dame Christie wrote as to send me out to the library searching for the original.

(I am sorry if I throw out any spoilers discussing the mysteries.)

Gay Marriage: Sin and Inclination

[I]t seems to me that the problem here is that this justification for gay marriage relies on making inclination the basis of the morality of the act. It also seems to either make a distinction between some inclinations as more valid than others, or else open the door to nearly any form of sexual behavior imaginable.

Prudence

On the advice of friends whose advice in these matters is to be trusted, I've been reading Josef Pieper's The Four Cardinal Virtues. I'm only a few chapters into the first section, on prudence, and I'm finding it fascinating. Pieper states that prudence is somewhat of a "lost" virtue now, seen often as weakness, cowardice, or "small-minded self preservation". But nothing could be farther from the truth: prudence is "the mold and 'mother' of all the other cardinal virtues, of justice, fortitude, and temperance. In other words, none but the prudent man can be just, brave, and temperate, and the good man is good insofar as he is prudent."

Prudence is the ability to make right decisions that are based on and informed by reality -- both objective reality, and the facts of a particular circumstance.

Christianity and Self Pity

I'm going to go ahead and do some re-posting to mark our anniversary. With ten years gone by, in flipping through the archives I find some posts I feel like I wrote just a year or two ago, and others that I have no memory of writing. (Some of those latter aren't even by MrsDarwin.) Here's one that falls in that latter category, which I think touches one some timeless points and also reflects much on where our lives were back in 2005.

A few weeks back, everyone was quoting a piece by some bitter little British woman about how angry she was over the Christian allegory in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Nothing, she insisted, was worse than Christ's effrontery in going and dying for everyone. Who asked him to do that?

Who indeed...

I think one of the most offensive things about Christianity for those who have chosen to hate it is that there's really no room for self pity in the Christian framework.

The pagan gods of the Greeks and Romans were easy to resent. They didn't die, they dallied endlessly with mortals, and although humans suffered from their caprices as well and enjoying their occasional favors, the gods actually had less claim to nobility, certainly less claim to suffering than men did. Indeed, reading Homer (before Hesiod and later writers began to abstract the gods, turning Zeus into a type for justice) one gets a certain sense that men are (despite their weakness and mortality) above the gods, because they know what it is to suffer and overcome.

This must have had a certain (though rather cold) sort of comfort. While on the one hand begging the gods for favors (and bribing them with sacrifices) one could also rage against them. "You don't know what it is we suffer. You don't know what it is to lose a loved one, to sicken, to starve, to lose a child, to suffer all the innumerable trails of frail humanity."

Christ denies us that self-indulgence, by having drunk deeper from the cup of human suffering than any of us. We cannot cry to the Christian God that He knows not how we suffer. He does, and more, and he was there first.

I think is what offended the British authoress: having humanity's collective thunder stolen by a God was betrayed by one of his close friends, imprisoned, beaten to within an inch of his life, tortured, mocked, and died a death of unimaginable suffering. In his self sacrifice, Christ rendered any attempt at self pity, any attempt to rail that the gods don't understand, any attempt to lash out at Him inherently ridiculous. Anyone who looks at a crucifix knows that he has nothing over God. And for those who don't want God, who would rather see Man as the great tragic yet noble figure of our world, that must be the most upsetting thing of all.

I was thinking of all this while looking back over the past year, as I myself was coming dangerously close to self pity.

It's been a year of trails and blessings. I landed a good job at a good company, ending a year of freelance work and chronic under-pay. However on Good Friday my wife and I lost our unborn child at three months. Yet God blessed us with another child, baby Smaskig who alerts us daily to her health with kicks and surges, and who is due at the end of February. As the year ends, my father is in the last stages of dying of cancer. The costs of time off work and visits to Los Angeles are sitting on the credit cards. After being separated from my wife and daughters for two weeks while spending time with my father, I came back and came down sick with what MrsDarwin had. The doctor helpfully loaded up our credit cards with a pharmacy worth of prescriptions (which happily are working) and my wife's father and five siblings came out for a long planned visit through New Years, and we promptly got half of them sick. (House population 10, sick list 5) So I'm desperately trying to get well in time to return to work on Tuesday, knowing all the while that by that time my father will quite probably be dead, and I'll soon have to take a couple more days off work to fly out for the funeral.

And just as I was getting up a really good head of steam for my self pity, I thought of whom I address my cares and hopes to each morning and evening, and realized I had nothing over Him.

There really is a limit to the self pity that we as Christians can muster. Our whole religion cries out against it, for our savior has taken all these sufferings to Himself and more, upon the one person who can be said truly not to deserve any suffering at all.

The Ten-Year Post

Today is our ten-year blogoversary. On June 8, 2005, Darwin decided it was time to stop holding forth at such length in Amy Welborn's combox at Open Book (he went under the name Scotus, and I couldn't figure out why he wanted to be known as the Supreme Court Of The United States), and launched DarwinCatholic. Back in those early days he was doing valiant battle with Catholic Creationists, hence the name of the blog. 

We'd been thinking of running a series of "Greatest Hits" posts, one from each year, but then we considered the prospect of combing through ten years of archives and quailed a bit. But if anyone has any favorites, or just faint memories of a post that tickles the edges of your brain, mention it in the comments, and we'll dig it up for you.

We have built more friendships through blogging than through almost any other activity, and we are so grateful for all the wonderful readers and commenters who've kept our combox interesting, fruitful, civil, and sane. That is no small thing on the internet.

For memory's sake, here is Darwin's first post on the blog. Ah, to be 26 again!

***

Kick-off

I've been threatening friends and family for some months with starting a blog, and since my personal and work commitments have reached the point where I really don't have time to add a single thing, this of course seemed like the ideal time.

Why "DarwinCatholic"?

For one thing, it's unexpected. If you're currently wondering what DarwinCatholic means, that's how I'm trying to help you remember it.

First, a little about me. (I've always been charmed by how Gregory of Tours began hisHistory of the Franks with the creed, feeling that his readers should know what he believed before they heard what he had to say.)

I am first and foremost a Catholic.

Politically and culturally, I am a conservative.

My brief career as a published writer consisted of a couple SF/F stories and two book reviews in New Oxford Review in which I criticized creationism/intelligent design and defended the compatibility of Catholicism and evolution. Which I have the feeling is why I stopped being invited to write book reviews for NOR...

Professionally, I am a data analyst, web designer and all around entrepreneurial type.

I'm married to the beautiful MrsDarwin, and we have two little girls (monkeys?) aged 3yrs and one-and-a-half.

And I'm still under thirty.

Which brings me back to this blog's name: DarwinCatholic.

One of the things that really struck me was the cultural/demographic differences between my wife and me (and our friends from college) and most of the other people our age that we met through work.

My wife and I married a month and a half after graduating from Franciscan University of Steubenville. (We had been going out for three and a half years.) Many of our friends also married within a year of graduation. Most of us also had our first child within a year of getting married, and our second within two years after the first. We got office jobs and middle class incomes. Some of our friends had degrees in majors, such as Computer Science, designed to win jobs. Others, like me (I majored in Classics), learned on the job and caught up fast. We bought houses before we were thirty. Several of us started businesses, with varying degrees of success. We became, in the buzzwords of David Brooks, exurban natalists.

Meanwhile, my co-workers (mostly several years older than I) dated, partied, and assumed that I must be over thirty. The idea of "settling down" in your early twenties was totally inconceivable to them, and when I mentioned that my wife and I hoped to have 5-7 children, everyone thought I was joking.

After several years, we moved to Texas, where we had a number of friends. Texas, even in the liberal Austin area, is certainly more family friendly than Southern California. However even here, hearing that someone has more than three children is almost a dead give away that they are religious and at least moderately conservative in their practice thereof.

Certain (admittedly tiny) subgroups present event more extreme examples. In the homeschooling circles that I knew during high school, families of 8-12 were not unusual.

Looking at all this, I can't help wondering: at what point does all this start to become statistically significant? My wife and I both know a lot of other alumni of the Catholic, large family, homeschooling environment, and most of them, like us, as still strong Catholics and look forward to having at least moderate size families. If this holds true for a couple generations, how will the Catholic and indeed the general American demographic landscape shift over the next 60-80 years? If liberals average 1.6 children (and based on European demographics that's pretty likely) and conservatives average 2.6 children, how long will it take the country as a whole to lurch to the right? Or will it?

I continue to have vague ambitions of going to trying to find funding to do a serious demographic survey looking for correlations between religion, politics and reproduction. But more on that later...

The Wound That Will Not Heal

My sister and I were caravanning with nine kids between us, and it was lunchtime on Friday, so we stopped at a pizzeria, one of a popular Cincinnati chain of restaurants. We sat at a few tables pushed together in a big room, in which were already gathered a group of four old ladies playing cards ("They look like the Golden Girls," my sister whispered) and, in the corner, a group of twenty-somethings in a booth. It took a moment to settle all kids -- two high chairs, a sling for my two-month-old niece's carrier, and the big kids down at the end. William, 17 months, was bored and antsy after several days of chaotic schedule and driving. He scribbled with the free crayons and every now and then would let out a cheerful high-pitched shriek, and I would pop goldfish or croutons in his mouth, or ply him with lemonade, or give him a fresh section of paper to draw on. He settled down to demolish a plate of cut-up cheese pizza, but as my sister and I worked out the details of our last leg of travel, he would squeak at me now and then just to remind me that he was still here and eating, okay, mom? 

As we were finishing up everything, William gave one more yip.

"Shut up!" screamed a lady from the card-playing table.

Our table froze in a collective horror. Finally I turned around and looked at the ladies. I stared each one in the face, and I hope I may never again see such coldness and hostility. I don't remember what most of them looked like, but one lady, not the screamer, sticks in my memory, her blue hair matching her blue flowered shirt and polyester slacks. I looked at her for a good five seconds, and she looked at me, still holding her hand of cards, shaking her head slightly, her eyes behind her big glasses big, her brow knit.

I stood up, seizing William out of his high chair and knocking over the glass of lemonade. 

"I am sorry, " I said, in a voice that was not quite as controlled as I wanted it to be, "that a little child offends you."

The blue lady fidgeted. "He's been screaming ever since you brought him in," she said, gilding the patent falsehood with the very slightest defensive edge of explanation. 

I repeated myself.

"Poor parenting skills," said the screamer, and the table tsked and murmured in agreement. 

We were leaving by now, shaky and disorganized, the children solemn and frightened. The waitress, who was, I think, sympathetic to us, told us to just bring the bill up front and she'd ring us up. As we left the room, the table of twenty-somethings started cheering and applauding the courageous stand of the old ladies.

My sister, two months postpartum, was trembling and gasping out great sobs as she clutched her baby carrier. 

"I have to get out of here," she said. "Did you hear them cheering? I've never seen anything like it. They're cheering that we left. I can't believe anyone would do that."

My eleven-year-old was weeping too. Diana and her little cousins huddled together. William, smearing my shirt and his overalls with pizza, burbled and grinned and batted his big blue eyes. 

Externally I was calm -- I'd been able to speak mildly to the little ones I had to take through the store afterwards, and I'd been pleasant as I waited for them to go through the bathrooms, but I could feel myself slipping into reveries and shutting out the kids without meaning to. Driving gave me another hour to brood. My eyes were hot and prickly behind my sunglasses as I tried to breath easily and pray, a chaplet of Divine Mercy for the ladies and the young people and the entire situation.

For the sake of his sorrowful passion Did you often find it helpful, in your long experience, to scream "Shut up!" at a seventeen-month-old? Did they listen? Have mercy on us Here's my baby. His name is William. Would you like to tell him to shut up to his face? AND ON THE WHOLE WORLD How did you shut your kids up? Would you prefer I slap him? Is that what you did?

And the more I tried to turn away from these thoughts, the more they intruded. I know, and knew at the time, that confrontation only builds defensiveness, and that the kind of hardness I saw is only softened by the Holy Spirit, not by any words of mine, and I regretted saying anything at all and giving them the opening to make the poor parenting crack. I hate giving people ammunition. And the crack rankled, not because I thought it was true on any level, but because it was a lie. A lie that stood unchallenged, and that the lady knew was a lie when she said it, but spit it out anyway because it was something defensive and hurtful to say. And I hoped that I would never get so old that I would forget what it was like to have babies, and to have people judge you based on one isolated situation. I hoped that her estranged children would spit on her grave HAVE MERCY ON US, AND ON THE WHOLE WORLD

Then there was the frustration of not knowing what happened afterwards. Aslan said that no one is ever told any story but his own, but I wanted to hear someone else's story. That kind of hatefulness leaves a mark. Did any of the ladies feel ashamed afterwards? Would they lie awake tonight and regret their actions? Were their divisions in the group, with some feeling that maybe they'd been too harsh? Would the lady I stared at remember my face until her dying day? Maybe the manager had kicked them out afterwards. Had anyone else complained? What if two of the young people had been dating, and one was so disgusted by the other's behavior that they broke up right then FOR THE SAKE OF HIS SORROWFUL PASSION

The next morning at breakfast, we were with a large easy group of old friends and companions at a retreat center, all gathered for the dedication of the new chapel. A small boy sitting at the next table was sing-songing "Shut up! Shut up!" in the same sharp tone we'd heard the day before. Diana turned to someone at our table. 

"The lady at the restaurant told us to shut up yesterday," she announced matter-of-factly, and my heart broke that this was imprinted now on my four-year-old's memory, the time the old lady screamed at us.

The mass for the dedication of the chapel was beautiful in every way, but during the Eucharistic prayer I felt such anger that it was as if I was under attack. I tried to listen to the words of consecration, and I kept coming up with more things I could have said in the moment. Every time I wrenched my attention back to the Mass, fresh arguments popped up -- not even things that I would have said, or wanted to have said. All I could do was trust that the healing power of the Eucharist would work on me. And it did, and for a while I was quiet.

But of course, on the long drive home, I had plenty more time to think about it. I thought I'd let it go earlier, but I hadn't, and now rage was bubbling up and almost consuming me. If this was how I felt about a minor injustice, how must it be for people who've had to deal all their lives with systematic abuse and cruelty? How hard must it be to forgive, and how deeply must those wounds run? A line from a hymn we'd sung came to my mind: "If you are lost, look to the cross." And so I did, and it struck me: we need a God who has suffered more than we have, to put all of our injuries into perspective. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Here's my baby. Look at him. He looks like my brothers. It's easy to be cruel when you don't have to deal with an actual person, isn't it? FATHER, FORGIVE THEM, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

That was Saturday. On Sunday I went to Mass again, and felt under attack again. Okay, I need to go to Confession this week. I thought. I need to tell the priest, "I've been so angry this week. I've hated someone. I was at a restaurant with my baby, and a lady said to me..." And at even the thought of speaking this out loud, tears nearly spilled over, and I had to wrench my attention back once again. 

What a wound hatred leaves. What an ugly mark. I like to think of myself as a calm, even-tempered, rational person, and usually I am, I guess, but my life has been comparatively free of large scarring events, and what sad events there have been are so far in the past now that they rarely affect my day-to-day living. I wonder how long it will be before this moves to the back burner of my consciousness, and I can stop thinking about alternate scenarios and pretty revenge fantasies Maybe someone filmed it and will put on Youtube, and the whole world will rise up in indignation I don't even want that to happen FATHER, FORGIVE ME, FOR I KNOW NOT WHAT I DO.

The Problem With Lay Catholic Organizations

There is a constant slow trickle of stories about Catholic institutions getting themselves into trouble over having employees (sometimes Catholic, sometimes not) who are not living according to Catholic teachings. For a long time, it seemed like the standard script for this was a female Catholic teacher or church employee being fired for using IVF, having a child out of wedlock, or getting an abortion. More recently, there have been a spate of controversies over employees of Catholic organizations entering into or advocating for same sex marriage. One of the more high profile recent examples is Catholic Relief Services. Controversy simmered for the last couple months after CRS admitted the accuracy of a charge leveled by the Lepanto Institute that their Vice President of Oversees Finance had entered into a same sex marriage and was a same sex marriage advocate via his social media accounts. The incident closed, more or less, with the vice president resigning earlier this week, though in its press release announcing the resignation, CRS made a point of decrying those who had criticized him.

On April 20, a self-described Catholic defense group issued a report on Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) vice president for overseas finance, Rick Estridge. Mr. Estridge was a valued employee of CRS for 16 years. He held a technical finance position that did not involve mission-related decisions. Because of that, CRS did not require that position to be held by a Catholic, and Mr. Estridge is not Catholic. He entered into a same-sex civil marriage two years ago, when doing so became legal in Maryland. Because of the stress this situation has caused Mr. Estridge and his family, he has made the decision to leave CRS.
...
CRS respects Mr. Estridge’s decision and thanks him for his service. He has done a tremendous job during his years at CRS and will be missed. We are grateful that he has agreed to be available as needed for consultation to ensure a smooth transition.

CRS also wants to express its strong objection to these types of attacks and the tactics of the groups which launch them. This highly personal, public critique broadcast Mr. Estridge’s home address and used derogatory terms that are now part of the online record. This has caused great pain for many people. As a Catholic agency, CRS is committed to treating all people with the respect and compassion they deserve as children of God. We detest hurtful campaigns that do not build up, but undermine, individuals and Church agencies carrying out the mission of bringing the love of Jesus Christ to those who are suffering.

They're right, of course, that these kind of campaigns have a distasteful edge to them. However much one agrees with the campaigners (and I do) as to how inappropriate it is for a Catholic apostolate to be hiring people who clearly don't agree with Church teachings, we're talking about campaigning to have someone lose their employment. None of us would like to lose our jobs, and while any day on which you lose your job is a bad day, doing so because someone doesn't like your beliefs or your family must be even more painful that losing your job because the company is simply downsizing or some other "it's not personal" kind of reason.

And yet, I think many people rightly expect that an organization closely tied with the USCCB, one for which collections are taken up in our parishes one or more times a year, is not merely doing good humanitarian work but doing it in a clearly Catholic spirit. The same problem crops up with schools, hospitals, adoption agencies and a host of other types of organizations -- staffed, these days, primarily or exclusively by lay people who earn salaries for their work -- which at labeled as Catholic.

There seems to always be a tension, in regards to such organizations, over how much of their emphasis should be professional. Whenever a controversy over Catholic school teachers and morality clauses comes up, the "why is this a problem" side invariably states their objection in the form of: Don't you want a Catholic school to hire the best math teacher possible? I'd much rather have a Catholic school teacher who's good at his job.  Who cares what he does in his time at home!

In CRS's press release, they emphasize that being Vice President of Oversees Finance did not involve "mission-related decisions" and that the post thus did not need to be held by a Catholic. Now, I work in a finance department. My boss is the Vice President of North Americas Finance at my company. In our roles, however, we're still very much expected to care about and focus on the mission of our company, even though that's just providing consumers with a certain range of products. Often, it seems like finance is just an exercise in score keeping. We let people know the cost of various decisions, and they make the decisions. But it still matters that we do this with the company's mission in mind. If we publicly dissed the company's mission, we'd stand a good chance of getting fired.

At root, I'm very sure that CRS, Catholic schools, etc. care very much that all of their employees have the organization's mission at heart. If Estridge had been outed in the media for making callous and hateful jokes on social media about the suffering people around the globe that CRS makes it its business to help, I suspect that CRS would have felt far less conflicted about letting him go. However, I would imagine that Estridge had no qualms about devoting himself to CRS's humanitarian mission, even though he is not himself Catholic and disagrees with the Church on certain moral issues.

One of the things we do as employees is devote ourselves, at least conditionally, to the mission of the organizations that we work for. I've worked at companies with the mission of providing affordable consumer electronics or of serving quality fast food. These may not be the things that I most deeply believe in in life, but I am quite willing to devote myself to them 8-10 hours a day. I cared about my employer succeeding in its mission, and I ended up using company products more than I had before joining. There are other organizations that I would not work for, because I don't believe in their essential mission. I wouldn't go become a pricing director for Playboy nor would I work in finance analytics at Planned Parenthood. Similarly, I imagine that Mr. Estridge, although quite happy to work for CRS, would not have chosen to work as a finance VP at the Family Research Council.

What creates friction is that Catholic organizations often seem to develop an understanding of their mission which makes it quite possible for employees to devote themselves to the mission of the organization without actually aligning all the much with Church itself. A school ceases to be a community of Catholics focused on educating their children in the faith, and instead becomes an educational institution with some Catholic bits tacked on. A charity designed to serve Christ as found in the poor and suffering becomes a humanitarian organization which happens to be funded and staffed mostly by Catholics.

Through much of Christendom's history, this was a constant temptation for religious orders. They were founded with a particular mission rooted in Christ, but then people gave them property and money and soon you had a lax religious order which wasn't a bad route to comfort and security for people not already on the path to inheriting wealth. However, in our modern secular age this problem seems to crop up not so much with religious orders (which are mostly comparatively poor these days) but in lay organizations. They pay salaries in order to get people who will do certain jobs well, and people like to make salaries, so there's always a temptation on the part of the potential employee to think, "Well, I'm okay with the basic mission of this organization even if I don't agree with the Church as a whole, and so this looks like a decent enough job doing good work." If the organization itself is focused narrowly on its practical mission and not on that mission as rooted in faith, the organization can quickly become just another NGO.

And yet, as Pope Francis has said on a number of occasions, the purpose of the Church is not to be one more NGO. A Catholic school is not just there to educate. A Catholic relief organization is not just there to move money, food and medicine around. And yet it seems all too easy for Catholic organizations to fall into exactly this problem.

Sex, Grammar and the Holy Spirit

Fr. James Martin S.J. has become a sort of theological man about town on the media circuit. This brings with it the temptation to get attention by playing simply for controversy, especially the kind of controversy which comes from being too trendy by half. He seems to have headed in this direction the other day with a couple of tweets about referring to the Holy Spirit as female:

Gospel. The main way that we relate to God today is through the Spirit, which inspires, uplifts, enlivens, teaches, consoles. Listen to Her.

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 11, 2015

By the way, the term "Holy Spirit" in Hebrew, i.e., the form Jesus would have learned in the first century, is feminine: "ruacḥ." So: Her.

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) May 11, 2015

Leave aside the controversy baiting, which he so coyly engages in by first dropping the "her" and then explaining himself in his follow up. It's a low road to take, for certain.

What I think is more worth looking at here is the way that he attempts to make his argument, which is typical of the person trying to claim expertise before a general audience.

Fr. Martin immediately attempts to wrap himself in the mantle of scholarship by telling us what term Jesus would have learned in first century Hebrew for "Holy Spirit". But, of course, we have not a word of Jesus's own writing or speaking in Hebrew. We have Gospels written in Greek, which tell us (in Greek) what Jesus said. Occasionally the Gospels tell us what a word or phrase is in Hebrew, as when Jesus calls out "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" before dying on the cross. Additionally, the Holy Spirit, as a member of the Trinity, is not a name that was in common usage prior to Christ, since the concept of the Trinity did not exist in Judaism. So talking about what word Jesus would have learned for the Holy Spirit is a bit odd. Further, it's not clear how much Jesus spoke in Hebrew anyway. The everyday language of Judea was Aramaic, and the language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire was Greek, while Hebrew served as a Jewish sacred language. So while it sounds terribly knowledgeable to talk about what Hebrew word Jesus used to refer to the Holy Spirit, the fact of the matter is that in virtually no case do we know what Hebrew word Jesus used to refer to anything, or indeed if He used Hebrew much at all except to read the scriptures.

Now, Fr. Martin is right that the Hebrew word רוח (ruacḥ) meaning wind or breath is a feminine noun, and to our English-speaking ears that sounds significant, since we don't have noun genders in our language. Saying that the term Jesus used for the Holy Spirit is feminine seems like it means Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit as "her" or perhaps as the Holy Spirit-ette. However, gramatical gender is simply a type of noun declension which our fairly un-inflected language doesn't have.

What is grammatical gender? I'll borrow from Wikipedia:

In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun-class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, or verbs. This system is used in approximately one quarter of the world's languages. In these languages, every noun inherently carries one value of the grammatical category called gender; the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the genders of that language. According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words."

Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine and neuter; or animate and inanimate. In a few languages, the gender assignation of nouns is solely determined by their meaning or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, animacy. However, in most languages, this semantic division is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning (e.g. the word "manliness" could be of feminine gender).

This last example is not a hypothetical. The reason Fr. Martin's explanation sounded wrong to me is that one of the quirky vocabulary facts I remembered from all my years of taking Latin is that the Latin word for manliness and virility, virtus, is a noun with a feminine grammatical gender. Obviously, the Romans didn't think that masculinity was feminine, it's that grammatical gender does not necessarily align with sex. Hebrew is apparently the same way. A quick search brought up Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar with this to say on the topic:

It is important to understand that feminine nouns (grammatical gender) do not refer only to feminine things (natural gender) or masculine nouns only to masculine things. For example, the Hebrew word for "law" ... is feminine. This does not mean, however, that laws apply only to women. What the gender of a Hebrew noun indicates is the patter of inflection it will usually follow. In other words, masculine nouns take one set of endings for pluralization and feminine nouns take another.

So yes, the Hebrew word רוח (breath or wind) is a feminine noun. The Greek word πνεῦμα (air, wind, breath) which is used in the proper name for the third person of the Trinity (Πνεῦμα τὸ Ἅγιον) is neuter. And the Latin word spiritus, which we all know from hearing Spiritus Sanctus in the mass and elsewhere, is masculine. And all of that means only a little bit more than if Fr. Martin had said, "I refer to the Spirit as "she" because they both start with 's'."

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether this means Fr. Martin picked up this little factoid and was too ignorant of linguistics to realize that it didn't mean anything, or if he found it a useful way to grab attention while assuming that most of his audience wouldn't know the difference. But now you do know, be assured that this argument isn't worth the pixels it's printed on.

If This Goes On

Imagine if Austin Powers were a liturgist, waking up from a sleep that began in 1980 to go on as if liturgical dancing and felt banners were still cutting edge. That's kind of the flavor of a piece by Patrick Reardon in the National Catholic Reporter which tries to envision American Catholicism fifty years after the election of Pope Francis.

Song leader Sophia Santiago stood to the right of the altar of St. Gertrude Church in Chicago and invited those in the crowded pews and in folding chairs to greet their neighbors. "All are welcome," she proclaimed.

To the simple notes of a single piano, the parish choir and the congregation sang a sweet, lilting version of "Come to the Water" as liturgical dancers, altar servers, ministers of the word, parish chancellor Emma Okere and pastor Fr. Antonio Fitzgerald processed up the center aisle. The song filled the soaring interior of the 131-year-old structure. On a banner high behind the altar, in large, easily readable lettering, was a quotation from Pope Francis: "Who am I to judge?"

This was one of thousands of celebrations across the globe marking 50 years of rejuvenation and renewal dating from the election of Pope Francis in 2013, popularly called "refreshment of the faith."

The occasion of the piece is the pontificate of Francis, but the world it imagines draws nothing from the Church in the developing world, so close to the heart of Pope Francis and rapidly growing while the number of Catholics in first world nations is falling due to apostasy and low fertility. Rather, the author imagines that the future which was ushered in by Francis is pretty much like the future that Catholic progressives imagined back in 1980, just delayed by 33 years.

It's easy to laugh at the afflicted, and I've done my share over this article, but it strikes me that it also points to a more general problem that people have when thinking about the future. Since I've spent a lot of my week at work doing PowerPoint presentations to help executives understand various concepts, I though I'd pull out my trusty PowerPoint and provide you with a visualization.

Human societies tend to oscillate according to the spirit of the moment, but they're also anchored by fundamental realities of human nature. The Church is an institution which is both human and divine. It is the Body of Christ and it is guided by the Holy Spirit, but it is also populated by all too human people, and like any human institution the Church goes through intellectual, spiritual, and cultural fads. However, both human nature and divine guidance anchor the Church to a certain center, the truth, and so while we may veer first one way, then another, according to the spirit of the moment (age is too dignified a term, I think, in this case), we tend to revert to that center point to which we are anchored -- before overshooting it in some other direction.

And yet, wherever we are in the oscillation tends to seem like the most important point, and the spirit of the moment is easily confused with the truth -- or at least, we often see the truth through a filter tinged with the spirit of the moment. We may know at some intellectual level that there have been changes before, but it's easy to either see them as part of some overall arc of history leading up to the trend we see as most important now, or to minimize those past changes because they really don't seem so very important now. As such, when people think about the future they tend to take the spirit of the moment (as they perceive it) and project it out into the future indefinitely.

And this is one of the (various) embarrassing ways in which the National Catholic Reporter piece falls down. The author takes what he (based on a frame of reference which is arguably already thirty years out of date) thinks are the most important trends, and then projects them out in a straight line for the next fifty years. As a vision of the future, it's out of date even before it's done, and to see this it's only necessary to do a semi-serious job of thinking about what issues seemed most absolutely current and important 100 or even 50 years ago and trying to imagine today through the lens of people who thought that would always be the thing of the moment.

The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 11-4

This has been a long time in coming, not for any lack of effort. The installment nearly five times as long as the average installment, but there are big events to cover as Henri goes into the Battle of the Marne.

Near Nanteuil le Hardouin, France. September 8th, 1914. It was dark in the room. Then a dancing light began to play upon the walls, and he caught the slight smell of sulfur in the air. It must have been the pop of a match being struck that had awakened him. Henri sat up in the bed and saw Lieutenant Rejol lighting a pair of stubby candles on the dressing table.

Fishing his watch out of his pocket, Henri looked at the time. 5:40 AM.

“What are you doing, Lieutenant?” he asked, keeping his voice to a whisper.

From the dressing table Rejol picked up a strip of cloth on which gold embroidery glinted in the candle light. He draped the stole over his shoulders, a jarring contrast with his uniform tunic, and lifted each end in turn to kiss the crosses embroidered on it. “You’re religious, aren’t you, Captain? Can you serve mass for me?”

“The bugles aren’t going to blow until six.”

Rejol nodded. “There’s only just time.”

“Why on a Tuesday? Can’t you wait for Sunday?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “Who knows which of us will be alive on Sunday.”

Who indeed. The last twenty-four hours had been devoted so fully to getting them to this place that he had been allowed little time to think of the purpose for which they were here.

“I didn’t grow up religious. I was never an altar boy. I don’t know how.” But Henri was getting out of bed, being careful not to jostle Morel, who was clearly a sound sleeper.

“It’s not difficult.” Rejol opened his missal and laid it flat on the dressing table. “All you have to do is say the responses. When we reach one, I’ll point to it and you just pronounce it as best you can.”

Henri shook his head in disbelief, but knelt down next to his lieutenant, remembering how the altar boys knelt next to the priest at the beginning of mass.

Father Rejol murmured Latin phrases in a voice too low for Henri to hear, even as he knelt right next to him. Several times the priest crossed himself. Then he said in a soft but audible voice, “Kyrie Eleison.”

He pointed to the missal, and Henri repeated the response, “Kyrie Eleison.”

The mass was brief. No organ, no murmured rosary by the congregation, no sermon. When the time came Rejol poured a sip’s worth of wine from a flask into the little gold chalice and put a single, small host onto the patten. He leant over them, as if whispering to the bread and wine the part that they would be asked to play. His hands made the sign of the cross over them three times and then spoke softly to them again.

There some something curiously involving about this short, quiet sacrifice said on a dressing table. Henri had never been so close, seen the details of the priest’s actions and heard his low voice during the many quiet parts of the service. The darkness around the candles’ little pool of light isolated them from the surrounding world, taking them out of time. How many other times and places had these words been said? Perhaps five hundred years ago, knights following Joan of Arc had knelt thus next to a priest to hear mass before putting on their armor and taking up their weapons to drive English invaders off of French soil.

They were done before six o’clock, and Lieutenant Rejol packed away the mass kit in a black leather-bound box which he returned to his pack.

“Thank you, Captain.”

Henri shrugged. The experience was one which seemed violated by discussion or by any outside observer. He was glad that Morel had not awakened. Even Rejol, at this moment disconcertingly filling the roles of both lieutenant and priest simultaneously, seemed an invasion of privacy. A few minutes before he had been playing a part in something that was not his own, something far older than either of them. Now he was a more junior officer who had seen Henri in a moment of prayer.

“I’m going to go down and see if the orderlies have made coffee,” said Henri. “Make sure that Morel is awake before you come down.” He escaped downstairs. When Rejol appeared after having obeyed his instructions, they would simply be fellow officers, the awkwardness of this other connection gone.

In the kitchen, a coffee pot was bubbling on the black enameled stove whose bulk crouched against the wall opposite the back staircase. A kerosene lantern burned on the table, making the room cheery, although the bluish pre-dawn light straggling in through the windows was still weak. The door banged and an orderly came in, carrying a coal scuttle. He wrapped the coffee pot in a towel and carried it over to the kitchen table, then used a lid lifter to pick up the iron burner plate so he could shake a few pieces of coal into the fire below.

“I’m afraid it’s a little primitive here, sir,” he said. “But I found lots of jam in the pantry and there’s fresh bread on the table from the mobile bakery.”

Henri poured himself a cup of coffee and spread jam on a slice of the heavy, brown army bread. Outside the bugles sounded. Six o’clock.

Lieutenants Rejol and Morel came down the stairs with a clatter of steel shod boots on wood, and a moment later they were followed by Lieutenant Dupuis and Sergeant Carpentier, who had spent the night in the attic bedroom.

It was as Henri was pouring a second cup of coffee that the first German shell struck out in the farm yard. The sound was sharper than a thunderclap.The glass in the window panes rattled and cups and silverware on the table vibrated. Henri poured hot coffee over his hand and swore, dropping the cup which chattered on the the floor.

He ran for the kitchen door, the other officers following him, urgent to see what was happening outside. As he was about to reach it another shell landed, closer to the house, and the kitchen window exploded inwards, spraying glass shards into the room along with acrid smoke which burned in his nostrils.

[Continue Reading]

Re-run: The Wonder Game

A busy week for us here, as Darwin writes into the wee hours to finish his novella-length novel segment and the family gears up to go to Gettysburg this weekend. So, a re-post, and specifically, this post. I have been reading Stephen King's book On Writing, in which he exhorts all writers to edit out 10% of their first draft in revision, starting with "puffy" writing, adjectives and adverbs and all the little crutches an author relies on because he doesn't trust his readers to understand what he's getting across. And that reminded me of some of the puffiest writing I've read in the past year: Ann Voskamp's Thanksgiving paean. I've added back in the original bolding and italics. Get yer formatted wonder, right here.

The comments on the original post are well worth reading too.

***

I recently read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and I was surprised to find myself unmoved. Surprised because Gilead is beloved by many friends whose literary tastes are trustworthy. Surprised because Robinson is a good writer and Gilead is well-written. But it did not grab me. I could not surrender to it. It is a book of much spirituality, perhaps not surprising because the main character is a preacher and has fifty years' worth of sermons to draw on when the narration needs a little religious boost. Our narrator, John Ames, is an old man hastening toward death, writing his testament to his seven-year-old son. Impending death concentrates the mind wonderfully, we are told, and the book is suffused -- no, drenched -- with wonder. We are, to be sure, as Fanny Price says, a miracle every way, but the wonder of it began to wear on me long before the end of the book. 

There are several possible reasons for this. One is that, in my corner of the Catholic internet, there are many fine writers who are able to find the grace of the everyday, so that Robinson's reflections are not as novel as they might be to a reader who encounters no other medium through which to examine the manifestations of the next world in this one. I am used to reading the fine writing of Elizabeth Duffy, for example, and Robinson's writing reminded me of Elizabeth's, only Elizabeth is rather more hard-hitting than the mild John Ames, casting a clear eye on rinse/lather/repeat efforts to find grace in the mundane and often unflattering details of life.

I remember going to watch my sister at one of the state meets, where the girl who was favored to win, I think her name was Jenny, ran the first two miles well ahead of the pack, then not one hundred feet from the finish line, clenched up. Her jaw went tight, her legs stiffened. You could see her force a few steps before she fell down. People passed her, my sister among them, and the gal finally crossed the finish line on all fours.

It seems like I was just getting into competitive running at about that time, and I never was very competitive, because I was very precious to myself and concerned about the onset of pain. Sometimes, when running, I’d start to get a little tight, and think about Jenny and pull back–because her crawling across the finish line seemed like one of the greatest tragedies that could befall anyone. And of course it’s not, I now know, but back then I only knew one kind of glory–and that was staying comfortable. Also…winning, if the two could be combined.

It wasn’t until I had kids that I received my first hint of what my sister gleaned from her endurance–that there’s a point between fatigue and falling down that’s quite lovely, an out-of-body experience. Close your eyes, keep going, and the body just does what it needs to do with the tacit prompt of mind. I’ve felt it in childbirth during transition, and every so often, when I think I have no energy left for putting kids to bed and whatnot, somehow it just gets done.

This weekend we put in the garden. I’ve abandoned a large garden way out back that’s so far away from the house that I forget about it, so my husband made frames for three raised beds right outside the kitchen. In the course of the weekend, we dug out sod, turned over a lot of dirt, loaded and unloaded long boards. I’ve felt a little beat up, with scratches on my ankles and forearms from hard to handle boards, sore back, and restless leg syndrome at night. And none of this is complaint, but rather exultation. I got tired, but I kept working–like people who have babies, run long distance, write novels, or become saints.

Back in the days when I tried to write poetry, I wrote down a phrase in my little notebook, “I want to give glory to God without fear.” I kept thinking something would occur to me to follow that line, but over the years as I’ve looked at it here and again, I can’t think of anything with which to chase it. It’s still a concern of mine, but it’s more of a singular concern rather than one impression among many. I want to give glory to God without fear.

In so many of my endeavors (having babies, running, writing, trying to become a saint), I still hold myself very dear.

Another reason for my less-than-perfect engagement with Gilead is the grace vs. wonder divide. I didn't find the book so much full of grace as full of wonder,  the gentle wonder of a old man seeing life through the lens of death. So much goodness, so much beauty, if only everyone knew how beautiful they were. All very good things. But I've heard Robinson accused of having universalist tendencies, and I can see that in several instances. There is some ugliness in the book, some bad blood, but none of it manifests in the main character needing to make a moral choice right now, this moment, to rely on grace. In fact, what seemed like a crucial situation, in which John Ames fears that he might be leaving his wife and son to the predations of a malicious character, just melts away into a distant topical problem related to the 1950s setting. Ames does not, in the end, have to confront the necessity of depending on the grace of God to protect his family when he cannot. He has written reams of spiritual guidance and explication over the years, and yet when he appealed to as a preacher for counsel, he repeatedly wiggles out of having to give any concrete testimony to his beliefs. No one's really all that bad, it seems, and the malicious impulses of the heart, sin and evil, go, in my opinion, mostly unexamined, and we settle back into the predictable wonder of every day being the last day.

Robinson is, as I have said, a fine writer, and her wonder-ful images are memorable -- a young couple walking down the street, shaking raindrops off trees; a father and son neatening an abandoned, unloveable graveyard; the image, much dwelt on, of Ames's sooty father giving him a biscuit in the lull of helping to pull down a fire-struck church, an image that seems to resonate more with Robinson that with me because bread of affliction, communion actually has a literal meaning to me.  But again, it's wonder, rather than grace, that jumps out at me. Taking a book's cover blurb as any kind of meaningful analysis is an iffy proposition, yet in retrospect, this sentence sums up the book well:

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision -- not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation.

The lack of the corporeal vision of God is a problem because the main wonder of creation is that God became his own creation in a corporeal way. The body becomes a literal, not a metaphorical, conduit of grace. A vision of life as a wondrously strange creation without a corporeal vision of God tends to descend into treacle and nostalgia and soft soap.

Robinson is, of course, a gifted writer, skilled enough to keep her Pulitzer Prize-winning book from straying into the romantic and the purely picturesque. And then, and then, there's the wonder of Ann Voskamp:

Mama can kick leaves in the woods like she’s tearing back the crumpled paper wrapped over the surface of things. 

She walks with a stick. 

She dragged it out from under some maple saplings. And then she pins that trail under her right down. 

Like there’s no loud and flippant way she’s letting anything make her miss the now right under her, no way that that now could just up and slip out from under her. 

You could be a sophisticated cynic and miss your whole life that way. 

You walk a bold, amazed way when you know the destination is right here.

There is, apparently, a variety of wonder-drenched writing which drifts into a precious and almost unintelligible aestheticism, the sort of writing someone described to me as "'the tea-kettle's all dancy on the stove' shit".

What had Mary Oliver defiantly scratched down with an inked stick of her own? 

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” 

Everyone’s wild to stop feeling overwhelmed – but nobody ever wants everything to stop and be over. 

Mama walks like that through the woods. Like she knows it’s going to be over someday… all over. That your face will come tight right up to it and there’s no stick you can fine anywhere to fight time off. 

And then there’ll be that stark moment when you turn and see what you were married to. You can live your life as the bride married to Hurry, having affairs with Not Enough, Always Stress, and Easy Cynicism. Yeah, I guess we all get to choose our own bedfellows. 

Mama always said it and she didn’t care what anyone thought of it: God was her husband. And that ain’t just some metaphor to get the Pharisees all in a prudish knot – it’s brazen Scripture. Take it or go ahead and leave it. We all get to choose our own bedfellows – and who we’ll give our soul to, who or what will get our life. 

Mama’s standing there, already decided. 

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement, vowed to Awe Himself, covenanted to Christ –and I took the whole of everything He gave in this gloried world into my open arms with thanks. 

Because really? Yeah, I guess so — Anybody can be a cynic. Cynicism is laziness in every way. 

The real heroes are the ones who never stop looking for the possibility of joy. 

“Here is good. I think we should do it right here.” Mama taps the ground of the trail with her stick, holding here down. Here always has some good if you look at it long enough. 

“Good light.” Mama looks up. 

So that’s where Levi and I drag the tables to. Haul in stumps to stand in as legs for plank benches. Throw old quilts down as tablcloths and lay out the plates. 

“Are we crazy?” I tug at the end of one of the quilts. Mama raises her one eyebrow — “I mean, not in a general, yes, obviously-we-are-crazy sense — but in a specifically in a trying- to- have- a- Thanksgiving-dinner in- the- woods- sense?” 

Mama grins. Winks. Knowingly. 

Yeah – she doesn’t have to say it. 

Wherever you are – Thanksgiving is always for those crazy enough to see grace for the trees.

Thanksgiving is always for the courageous and Grace is always for the risky. 

We lay out the table and string up the banners and make up our Thanksgiving Tree  —- 

And it’s all ridiculous enough to be meant to be —

This is the sort of lush wonder that never requires one to develop it in a whole paragraph, the kind of cray-cray-crazy abandonment! that's so adorably luminous that to examine it with any kind of critical eye and ask, "What does this even mean?" makes one the laziest of cynics. It's the sort of Pinterest-ready spirituality that makes a brand of turning grace into a species of wonder, a packaged Christianity that makes you feel that maybe your life could achieve the pretty standard set by the author if only you buy her NY Times best-selling gratitude journal and accompanying devotional.

Robinson is better than this. Her wonder actually stands up to cynicism. But for once, for once, I actually yearn for the gritty ugly grace of Flannery O'Connor, because she dares to strip away the coatings and the veneers and the prettiness to show grace in all its raw and destroying beauty. The grace that sanctifies the tedious without stripping it of its penitential reality is a good deal more potent and enduring than the dreamy wonder of a "radically subversive" picture-perfect Thanksgiving table in the woods. The grace that stands in the face of evil and declares that it shall not triumph is more heart-wrenching than the broad and easy path of universalism. Wonder, yes. Enchantment, sure. But only as ancillary to grace, not as its totality.

"I Never Thought I Could Love Something Almost As Much As Myself"

Jumping off of our recent discussion in the combox of philosophically unsound and morally soppy blogs about mothering, here is a link for Anonymous, summing up my reaction when I read one of these "Motherhood is so precious because it has made me so much less selfish" posts: Until I Had Kids, I Never Thought I Could Love Something Almost As Much As Myself.

Having a child can be the most transformative experience of a person’s life. You get so used to living your life a certain way—focused solely on your job, your social life, your personal goals—and then, just like that, it all changes. That’s what happened to me last year when my daughter, Jane, was born. Until that moment, I never in a million years thought I could love anything almost as much as myself.

As soon as the nurse put her in my arms, that beautiful baby girl became the second-most important thing in my life. In an instant, I went from caring only about myself to caring about myself and also one other person. All but one of my priorities went right out the window. And that shift was permanent: My daughter has been an additional consideration in my life ever since, and I know in my heart that’s never going to change.

After me, it’s all about her.

When Jane came into this world, I wanted to do so much for her. I wanted to give her everything I could that wouldn’t require me to sacrifice too much of my free time or compromise any of my personal ambitions. That indescribable sensation of looking into her beautiful brown eyes for the first time made me realize I would do absolutely anything except risk my own life to protect her. That’s how much she means to me.

Every time I notice the way her face lights up when she smiles, or the way her chubby little cheeks puff out when she’s upset, I see some of myself in her. That’s the part I really love.

Can people write well about how parenting changes you and your parameters of selfishness? Sure, and for sheer honesty I recommend Betty Duffy's post on helicopter parents and the "old days".  But mothering, or parenting if we're going to be inclusive, also opens up vast new vistas for realizing selfishness. Let me tell you that I'm writing this while ignoring the baby latched onto my breast, who every now and then looks up at me with sweet blue eyes and then tenderly pinches my neck in the way that hurts most. The 9 year-old and 6 year-old are playing Monument Valley on my phone at 8am on a school morning, and the 4 year-old is rotting her brain by looking over their shoulders, and I hear the bickering and sniping that I know I ought to step over and lovingly correct, but I don't because the phone is buying me mostly quiet time in which to write this very post. I once swore that my kids would never watch TV, and now every afternoon I shunt them off to the computer to watch an episode of Mission: Impossible on Netflix, not so that I can pray or get a shower, but so that I can hunch in the kitchen in front of the newspaper spread out on the counter, but instead of reading the news I scroll down Facebook on my phone. Do you understand: I sit my kids in front of the glowing screen so I can read Facebook in peace. St. Gianna Molla, Bl. Zelie Martin, and Ma Ingalls weep for me.