Happy Easter

In anticipation . . .

Blessings on the Feast of the Resurrection to all!

On fasting

Lent is almost over, even though it seems Ash Wednesday was only a couple weeks ago. The fact that it sped by so quickly means I probably wasn’t paying attention closely enough. My sacrifices aren’t painful enough to notice.

It seems this was the Lent to focus on intentions and not deeds, not to give something up, but to try to be nice. In homilies, at our small group study, and on the internet I keep reading or hearing the prayer that goes “Fast from anger … Feast on patience; Fast from complaining… Feast on appreciation; Fast from negatives … Feast on positives; Fast from pessimism … Feast on optimism; Fast from worry… Feast on Providential Care; Fast from judging others … Feast on the Christ in them; Fast from emphasis on differences … Feast on unity of all life;” etc.

It’s a good message, but it all made me feel a little behind the times for giving up sweets and alcohol. I have a curmudgeonly side that wants to reply, “But you’re supposed to do that all the time! Lent is the time for something more!”

Yesterday I received an email from one of the ministries at church asking for dessert donations for a shrimp spaghetti fundraiser – on Good Friday. It got me a little spun up. I tried to compose an email reply about why we wouldn’t be participating, but couldn’t find the right tone, so I finally gave up and am turning to my blog to try to justify fasting from a thing.

I know petulance is not the way to sway hearts. Nor is it my place to try to convince people that fasting is good for them. But I do want to convince my kids that fasting is a valuable spiritual discipline, one that Christ mentions more than once. The challenge is to teach them that fasting is not about rules and discipline to merit redemption. It should be something you want to do, a sacrifice for love.

Now as I try to write this up, I feel more conflicted. The purpose of fasting can be obscured by dangers of scrupulosity or of using Lent as an opportunity to lose weight or feel self-righteous. Fasting from anger and unkind words is harder than sacrificing a dessert every once in awhile, not to mention the fact that giving up some food is not meaningful unless it works on our souls, as St. Basil instructs:

"Turning away from all wickedness means keeping our tongue in check, restraining our anger, suppressing evil desires, and avoiding all gossip, lying, and swearing. To abstain from these things---herein lies the true value of fast.”
And here is St. John Crysostom summing this idea up perfectly: "the value of fasting consists not so much in abstinence from food but rather in withdrawal from sinful practices."

So my little defense of fasting may be misdirected. Of course it is more beneficial to the soul to fast from unkindness and anger than from chocolate. Perhaps it is my weakness that I need to fast from a thing to remind myself that I’m supposed to be sacrificing my desires and knee-jerk emotions. My will is so wimpy that I need a material symbol of that spiritual fast to remind me to practice those virtues. But since our faith is full of material signs of immaterial realities, so I know I’m not the only person to suffer that weakness.

I came across a good message on fasting in the CRS literature that came with the little rice bowl collection boxes: The pangs of hunger when we sacrifice a snack are a reminder that we depend on God for our true sustenance. Declining a donut or chocolate candy when offered is a reminder that Christ gave up everything. A fast can be more than a symbol, as a couple of incidents this week made clear.


In addition to the reminder of our dependency, there’s the solidarity with the poor part. John Paul II, whose beatification is right around the corner, wrote this: "according to the Church's ancient tradition, all faithful today are called to abstain from meat and to fast, except for those who are reasonably prevented from doing so for reasons of health or age. Fasting has a great value in the life of a Christian, ... and to it must be united a sincere desire for inner purification, a willingness to obey the divine will and thoughtful solidarity towards our brothers, especially the poorest."

Our church, even though it serves dessert on Good Friday, also runs one of the largest and busiest St. Vincent de Paul centers in the area. A lot of very generous people make donations. I started volunteering just before Lent once a week, and had to mail off donor thank you letters one day. It made me feel quite small to see how magnanimous some of the donors were. But the center still cannot meet all the requests it receives. What is hardest is when someone shows up like the lady who just inherited her three grandchildren because her daughter is going to jail. She lives in public housing but now she has to move because her apartment is too small for the number of people according to the code. Meanwhile she makes $100 a week at her job. She was desperate when she came to the center, and she received some food and vouchers for the distribution center for clothing and furnishings and some assistance with utilities, but the center has a rule that it can only help her out financially once every 3 months. She can pick up a box of food once a week, but although she was thankful, you could still sense her despair as she left. It’s just not enough.


And here I spend the amount she makes in a month in one trip to the grocery store sometimes. I buy my kids fresh fruits and vegetables and scorn the white bread and canned soups she was sent away with. So giving up sweets – the Godiva chocolate chips and butter cookies that I keep stashed in my hidey cupboard above the refrigerator for stressed out moments - seems pretty insignificant if it is supposed to lead me to greater solidarity with the poor. And I know vanity is part of the reason I even do it. If I really wanted to do a painful fast, I’d give up caffeine. That would really make me dependent on God to get through the day. It’s humbling to realize how weak your will can be when fail at your fast – a good reminder that we need God, especially if we’re well-off enough to forget our needs sometimes.


Another reason to fast: Delaying gratification also increases appreciation. More on my shopping habits: to get to the cashiers at the commissary, you now have to walk through an aisle of Easter candy about 50 yds long, a veritable hallway of sugar. And if you shop at commissaries, you know there is always a wait. I usually try to shop without all the kids, but we happened to be short on time and milk this weekend, so we all had to go together. While we stood in line, my kids mmm’d and ahhh’d, and handled all the bags, poked the Peeps, shook the Skittles. And then my eight year old, who gave up chocolate, said, “All I really want is one really good chocolate bunny in my Easter basket.” Smart girl.


If my kids are eating chocolate cake on Good Friday, what will make Easter Sunday special? If we don’t experience privation, can we appreciate abundance? I want Lent to feel like a desert, even if it is only symbolic, so that Easter is more like paradise.


Thinking of Easter makes me think of yet another reason to voluntarily undergo privation: fasting makes us appreciate the blessings we have. Perhaps one of the things I miss most about not having a winter season here is that arrival of spring is barely noticeable. Few daffodils or tulips, few barren trees bursting into bud around the time of the Feast of the Resurrection. I was running the other day through a no mow space on base. A weed that reminded me of baby’s breath was sprouting everywhere. Suddenly I was transported to the lakeside road where my family vacationed in Michigan every summer when I was growing up. The ache of longing was strong enough to make me breathless, even though I had slowed down my pace. When I think of places where I want to live when we give up the wandering life, that area of the north springs to mind. Heaven is a little like Michigan in the summer, I imagine. Although my memory is colored by childhood nostalgia, my desire to return to Michigan is strengthened because I don’t live there. It’s a longing made stronger by absence, by exile. And it’s a longing that is accompanied by an overflowing of praise when it is fulfilled. Even the long drive on the way to the lake is a bearable penance because the anticipation of returning is a little intoxicating. The landmarks on the way are friends. You can’t help but be happy on summer vacation.


And you can’t help but give thanks when a fast is over. So as Holy Week gets underway, I’m going to try to pay a little closer attention to mortification, and to try to slow down a little even though the week ahead will be a full one.   Here is one last quote, from Pope Benedict's Lenten message, more eloquent than my long apologia:

Through the traditional practices of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, which are an expression of our commitment to conversion, Lent teaches us how to live the love of Christ in an ever more radical way. Fasting, which can have various motivations, takes on a profoundly religious significance for the Christian: by rendering our table poorer, we learn to overcome selfishness in order to live in the logic of gift and love; by bearing some form of deprivation – and not just what is in excess – we learn to look away from our “ego”, to discover Someone close to us and to recognize God in the face of so many brothers and sisters. For Christians, fasting, far from being depressing, opens us ever more to God and to the needs of others, thus allowing love of God to become also love of our neighbor (cf. Mk 12: 31).

Another good book

In honor of my husband's birthday today - and to the fact that we now have known each other for half of our lives - and in hopes of placating him after my less than cheerful morning welcome - here are some selections from a book I dipped into back in February. I started pulling up these quotes then, and set them aside in order to string them together in some kind of coherent essay.  Well, they still are not strung together.  But GretchenJoanna's review of one of Kass's other books, reminded me that I might as well throw them up here, and go back to doing my reading for class. We're diving into Dante's Inferno on Thursday, so I am busy trying to figure out in what circle of hell surly wives belong.

In preparation for our little self-guided marriage retreat to Oxford, MS, I read a little from Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying, by Amy and Leon Kass. Here are some sections I found interesting:

First, the selection from Emile, by Rousseau, on married lovers. The tutor tells Emile and Sophie on their wedding day that the love they feel on that day will only fade. After their initial protestations, he tells them how they can prolong their happiness by treating each other as lovers, not as a couple with rights and duties to each other, but as a couple that holds no power over each other: “It is not so much possession as subjection which satiates, and a man stays attached to a kept woman far longer than to a wife. It is mutual desire which constitutes the right. Law can restrict this right, but it cannot extend it . . . Hearts are bound in marriage, but bodies are not enslaved. You owe each other fidelity, not compliance. Each of you ought to belong only to the other. But neither of you ought to be the other’s more than he pleases.”


A few days later, the tutor goes back to Sophie, who seems to be withholding her favors in order to maintain control. He tells her: “Put modesty, and not capriciousness, in your severity. Let him view you as reserved, not whimsical. Take care that in managing his love you do not make him doubt your own. … Let him honor his wife’s chastity without having to complain of her coldness. . . . Whatever precautions anyone may take, enjoyment wears out pleasures, and love is worn out before all others. but when love has lasted a long time, a sweet habit fills the void it leaves behind, and the attraction of mutual confidence succeeds the transports of passion. . . . Then, in place of your former reserve, establish between yourselves the greatest intimacy. …Become his other half to such an extent that he can no longer do without you, and that as soon as he leaves you, he feels he is far from himself. . . .Every man who is pleased in his home loves his wife.”
This advice may not hold true for everyone.  But it seems Kierkegaard was happy in his marriage. What woman would not be happy to have a husband who would write thus about her:

As a bride a woman is more beautiful than as a maiden; as a mother she is more beautiful than as a bride; as a wife and mother she is a good word in season, and with the years she becomes more beautiful. The young girl’s beauty is obvious to many; it is more abstract, more extensive . . . . The housewife does not have a flock of adorers; she is not even beautiful, she is only beautiful in the eyes of her husband. To the same degree this beauty becomes more and more concrete, she becomes less and less subject to evaluation by ordinary appraising and selecting. is she therefore less beautiful? Is an author less rich in ideas because ordinary observation finds nothing, while the reader who has made him his sole study nevertheless discovers an ever-greater wealth? Is it a perfection in human works of art that they look best at a distance? Is it an imperfection in the meadow flower, as in all the works of God, that under microscopic scrutiny it becomes lovelier and lovelier, more and more exquisite, more and more delicate?”

More advice on happy marriage is in the selection from "Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage" by Robert Capon, an Episcopal priest writing in 1965. He goes on about the liturgies (in the Geek sense meaning the work of the community and of the home) that occur around the central areas of the home: the table and the bedroom. Capon observes that “marriage was instituted in the time of man’s innocency, but it has operated ever since under the shadow of the fall,” so while he is well aware of the boundlessness of desire, he argues for the boundaries of marriage as a means to find freedom. This selection is one of the longer ones in the book, for good reason. Capon has a lot of meaty things to say about the mystery and ridiculousness of sex, about the glory of romantic love, such as that represented by Beatrice, and the reality of married love.

“We were meant for greatness, for glory, for the vast coinherence of the City. Our romantic notions fit that. If our marriages do not, it is not because marriage is contrary to romance, but because we have violated romance itself, have made the fatal mistake of stopping at Beatrice instead of the glory. My wife is not my destiny, and she cannot stand being treated as if she were. Romance in marriage is not the artificial prolongation of the initial wonders of courtship. I cannot be her swain ever again. But I can enter with her into the fellowship of the mystery, and that is romance indeed. Beatrice, then, lies in my bed, and grows old and worn along with me. She is the minister of more than herself; that is exactly why I need not fear for her inevitable growing less. We must decrease, but the Glory will increase. The bed is one more of the exchanges of the City [of God].”

He goes on to say, “In bed as elsewhere, absurdity is the touchstone of our calling. The bed cannot be made foolproof because only fools are available to occupy it, but it can be made sane.”


It is made sane by being a means of creating community – i.e. a family. And the family makes a little economic system which is kept functioning by work and ritual. The table is the place where all meet together, a common geographical locus that draws the family and all who gather around it into one body, and entrance into the City. Although this all sounds heady and metaphorical, Capon writes with a sense of humor: he points out that if you have pizza two Fridays in a row, then kids will latch on to a ritual that you always have pizza on Friday. And beware of intruders attempting to takeover: the television, competing rituals like sports and work, music and clubs, etc.


Capon closes with this thought:

"We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones; we need a life neither patternless nor over-patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is Caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it. True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight. . . . Culture is the liturgy of nature as it is offered up by man. But culture can come only from caring enough about things to want them really to be themselves – to want the poem to scan perfectly, the song to be genuinely melodic, the basketball actually to drop through the middle of the hoop, the edge of the board to be utterly straight, the pastry to be really flaky. Few of us have very many great things to care about, but we all have plenty of small ones; and that’s enough for the dance. It is precisely through the things we put on the table, and the liturgies we form around it, that the city is built; caring is more than half the work.”

So cheers to my husband, a really great dancer who sweeps me off my feet, on his birthday, and cheers to all the small things we have to care about

Rambling on heroes

Another Friday Saturday now – time flies when buried in books. The Western Lit course I am teaching for the community college requires me to revisit old friends Achilles and Hector, Odysseus and Penelope, Aeneas and Dido. I feel a little guilty claiming to have “work” to do, when it is so pleasurable. I’m embarrassed to admit I had forgotten how rich these works are, full of insights on purpose and duty, passion and longing, betrayal and fidelity.

For class discussions, we’ve been focusing on the characteristics of a hero and the perils that impede the fulfillment of destiny and reflecting on the concepts of arête and sophrosyne. I hadn’t thought about how appropriate those concepts of human excellence or living up to your potential and of self-control and prudence can be even to the vocation of motherhood.

As a guide for teaching, I’ve been consulting a former professor’s book: Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil by John Alvis. I had Dr. Alvis for American Lit and remember more his gravelly Texan voice, which my cousin compared to John Wayne’s, than his comments in class. His book is full of excellent reflections on the struggle in the soul and in society between passion and duty. Probably would be good reading for all those congressmen who are trying to decide our fate today. Like the gods warring, they forget the consequences for us small folk trying to live life without too much interference from them. If the gov’t goes on furlough, I suppose the positive will be that we won’t have to pack out of here as quickly as we anticipated, but the negative is that the commissary might close! I don’t know what other consequences are real or rumors floating around facebook.

So back to the Greeks and Romans: first I admire Penelope’s restraint – who doesn’t love reading about her cleverness and self-control? And the happy reunion:

"But the royal couple, once they'd reveled in all/ The longed-for joys of love, reveled in each other's stories, / The radiant woman telling of all she'd borne at home, ... And great Odysseus told his wife of all the pains/ he had dealt out to other men and all the hardships / he'd endured himself - his story first to last - and she listened on, enchanted . . .' Sleep never sealed her eyes till all was told."

Just like the punch of recognition in the exchange between Andromache and Hector, reading this scene as a military wife has a much stronger resonance than it did as a college student.

But I also love reading about Medea’s meltdown. I had forgotten the power of these Greek dramas. So affecting. Here’s Medea who has sacrificed her family and her homeland to preserve and assist Jason, and he’s throwing her over for a younger girl with better connections. And Jason tries to tell Medea that his decision is common sense and in the best interest of the children, and that she makes too much of the affairs of the bed. Does his betrayal merit her horrific acts of retribution? Medea’s mistake was letting love overrule the connections of family and society in the first place: “Love is a dangerous thing: Loving without any limit.”

The question the chorus raises about whether people are happier without children is an interesting problem – being a parent is full of trials, and the joys are often ineffable. From the fifth choral ode:

 “That people without the function of parent

Are happier than the begetters of offspring.

The childless man has no way of telling

Whether he misses a curse or a blessing.

Nevertheless, the childless person 

Certainly misses many a burden."

This passage reminded me of a conversation with a guy who had to enter my request for maternity care into the computer for government health care. I was just pregnant with my fourth, and he was amazed we were having so many children. He and his wife had decided not to have any children because children were so much trouble and expense. This couple wanted eventually to buy a boat and travel and retire on an island. But here he was doing data entry, and he was older than I was by at least a decade. As he was talking I had this image of my grandparents and holiday dinners and the overflowing pleasure they used to take in having all these children around. What would this guy do for joy when he was too old to go out on his boat with his wife? What if she left him?

You have to wonder if the chorus is being ironic, deliberately ignoring the implication of The Odyssey that great joy and wisdom come only after great suffering, which is the other theme of our class discussions of the heroic journey. Hence, Aristotle’s argument that tragedy is the highest form of imitation. Everyone likes a good, gut-wrenching plot: “Over the years, you know, /a man finds solace even in old sorrows, true, a man/ who’s weathered many blows and wandered many miles,” says the faithful swineherd Eumaius.

One of the journal assignments which I borrowed from another teacher who gave me her syllabus was to compare your life story with the heroic journey.  Some interesting responses.  I suppose you could make the argument that the urge to write and read blogs fulfills the same desire to apply narrative structure and to give heroic dimensions to our own stories.

Another good quote from the translator of my copy of Medea, Paul Roche: “Translations, it has been said, are like wives: the beautiful are seldom faithful, and the faithful are seldom beautiful.” While I enjoyed the translation of Stanley Lombardo’s Iliad in the Norton Anthology, Roche’s translation of Medea is much more affective than the Anthology’s by Rex Warner. That such different poetry can be made of the same work says something about the inexhaustibility of the creative spirit.

Fortuitously, I happened to hear the song "You Lie" by The Band Perry on the country music station on the way to class. It could be Medea's theme song, and it's a great example of similes in the epic style: “You lie like a Persian rug on a rich man’s floor, you lie like a coon dog sunning on my front porch, you lie like a penny on the parking lot of the grocery store.” Say what you will about country music; these are some great images.


This class lasts only six weeks. One of my biggest challenges is picking and choosing what to read from the text. The next section is Eastern writings, which requires me to do a little more research. But even what little I’ve read so far, seems familiar. How similar the teachings of wise men. Why do people need to hear these directions over and over, and yet still fail to walk that narrow way? Back to Medea and her passions.

Things I love quick takes.

Things I love:

1. Our new lunch containers. Picked them up for $5 at Old Navy. Remind me of Bento boxes, but fewer pieces. Easy to clean and pack: room for sandwich, fruit, and crunchy thing. No more plastic baggies!

2. This passage from The Iliad, book 6. I almost started crying when I was reading it outloud in class last night. How many times have I seen a kid be shy with their dad in uniform?

Andromache, shedding tears, clinging to his arm as she spoke these words:
 "Possessed is what you are, Hector. Your courage
Is going to kill you, and you have no feeling left
For your little boy or for me, the luckless woman
Who will soon be your widow....
Hector, you are my father, you are my mother,
You are my brother and my blossoming husband.
But show some pity and stay here by the tower,
Don't make your child an orphan, your wife a widow. . . .

And great Hector, helmet shining, answered her:

"Yes, Andromache, I worry about all this myself,
But my shame before the Trojans and their wives,
With their long robes trailing, would be too terrible
If I hung back from battle like a coward.
And my heart won't let me....
 .. the pain I will feel for the Trojans then,
For Hecuba herself and for Priam king,
For my many fine brothers who will have by then
Fallen in the dust behind enemy lines --
all that pain is notheing to what I will feel
For you, when some bronze-armored Greek
Leads you away in tears, on your first day of slavery."

...With these words, resplendent Hector
Reached for his child, who shrank back screaming
Into his nurse's bosom, terrified of his father's
Bronze-encased face and the horsehair plume
He saw nodding down from the helmet's crest.
And Hector removed the helmet from his head
And set it on the ground all shimmering with light.
Then he kissed his dear son and swung him up gently
And said a prayer to Zeus and the other immortals . . .


3. My Riverside Shakespeare edition, slipcovered in two volumes. A graduation gift from my grandfather. I know, you’re supposed to keep these on a shelf, but I dragged it around in college. Made me feel slightly Elizabethan to read from a book with gilt edges.

4. This weather! It’s beautiful here in the south. Not too hot, not too cold. A profusion of azaleas. But no dogwoods. I heard on Felder Rushing this morning that they had died off down here (from the storm? from aggressive road trimmers? A plague?) but they’ll be back.


5. First Friday and April Fool’s Day. My kids got me twice this morning: first kid came down and told me the school phone system called last night and it was a free dress day (no uniforms.) That was more a trick on himself than me. And then another came down and reported a lizard on the ceiling. I fell for that one. Youngest son released accidentally an anole in the house last week, but I thought it had been captured and returned to its native habitat. I had visions of the time my brother noticed a three inch slug crawling down the wall behind me as we played charades.

Pink cast is not a joke. But something to love.

6. This book from the library about Audrey Hepburn, Just Being Audrey by Margaret Cardillo. Love that my 8 yr old daughter loved it. Loved that everyone seemed to enjoy watching Roman Holiday last weekend. Love Gregory Peck’s expressive look at Audrey as she answers questions from the press.

7. Having nice neighbors with a nice swimming pool. (Yes, it was that warm last weekend.) Recently found out how small the world is: I worked for a week with their son at the national spelling bee 19 years ago.

Linking back to Jen at Conversion Diary, another thing to love!