Affective books

I really had good intentions of writing something reflective for Holy Week; instead I have been chewing on thoughts about what Ten Books Have Influenced Me the most. This list is going around at multiple blogs. I already whiled away more time than I care to admit looking at other people’s lists, before I decided to write my own. Limited to 10 books, I’m going to skip over some of the picture books that I loved and formed an aesthetic (thinking of Tasha Tudor books, D’Aulaires book of Greek Myths, and the English Fairy Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham), the Bible, and Jane Austen. I’d like to say Shakespeare was an influence, but I can’t think of any behavior modifications that accompanied my reading of him, except that I look for Shakespeare in the Park performances to attend in the summer. Nearly every place we’ve lived has them. Not sure about here, seeing that the heat and mosquitoes make a summer evening in a park sound like something out of the Inferno, instead of Shakespeare.



So here are a few that came to mind, roughly in chronological order of my encounter with them:

1. Anne of Green Gables – confirmed that mooning about was a worthwhile way to spend time. I didn’t have a grove of bridal blooms near my house, only a vacant lot to hide in, but it had enough trees to become a woods in which to live an imaginary life.

2 .Gone with the Wind – one of the first adult books I read. Influenced my interest in the South and Southern literature, although it certainly didn’t make any college reading lists. As a fifth grader I sat in our blue velvet Queen Anne chair and weeped when Rhett finally walked out on Scarlet. I’m almost afraid to admit how much I loved and admired Scarlet and wanted to be a strong woman just like her. I also loved that I could succeed at Trivial Pursuit because so many questions asked about the book or the movie, also a favorite.

3. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Green – a book I wanted to steal from the library. Suddenly I wanted to fall in love with somebody, anybody. I haven’t reread this book since middle school – I wonder if I should go back to it or if some spell would be broken. I can't say that the book itself really influenced the way I live, but it led to a fascination with World War II and the writers formed by it, so it influenced what I read.

4. The Closing of the American Mind – Dramatically narrowed my college search to universities with a Great Books program. John Henry Newman's Idea of a University confirmed this choice, as did The Sacred Wood by T.S. Eliot, in particular "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which changed the way I read books.

5. Brothers Karamazov – A moving answer to how to live and how not to live. My quick answer to "What is your favorite book?"

6. Confessions - Augustine’s defense of beauty as a way of knowing God eased doubts left over from adolescent rebellions/investigations

7. Love and Responsibility – why I am married and have 6 children. Assigned by a professor who opened my eyes to the beauty of the Catholic faith and to a countercultural way to raise a family. This professor went on to translate The Theology of the Body. I also borrowed his oldest son’s name for my secondborn, a name now popularized by our current Pope.

8. Wendell Berry’s work – confirmed and elevated a desire (perhaps rooted in the Little House books) to live an agrarian life. But we can’t all live in the country, so second best perhaps is the new urbanist ideal of human scaled cities, where you live close to where you work, shop, learn and worship. An ideal fed by my husband’s reading.

9. Design Your Own Classical Curriculum by Laura Berquist – opened my eyes to homeschooling, our way of life for four years, for which I still feel nostalgic. Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver and Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun, both given to me by my grandfather, also fueled an interest in alternative education, after I had spent a certain number of years feeding an adolescent disrespect for teachers.

10. There are a handful of spiritual books that have informed my theological beliefs and habits. Like many people, C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity was my introduction to theology. And it was perhaps the first book I read with an interest in learning about and amending my own life. Simone Weil’s "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View Toward the Love of God" from Waiting for God, and Kathleen Norris’ Quotidian Mysteries, both embodying a St. Teresian attentiveness to little things, (but in more appealing writing styles), and Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis, which, since I grew up the child of converts, was the first saint’s biography I ever read (no Vision saint books in my past), formed my ideas about what a Christian life looks like.  And finally, Pope John Paul II was the first and only Pope I knew of for most of my life, and his writings, perhaps especially Familiaris Consortio, were revolutionary to me.  An antidote to wanting to be a Scarlet.

Still need to work on self-discipline in the practice of making lists...

Backtracking again

I started this post a couple days ago – before my sister more eloquently described our day. I wouldn’t bother to post it, but I know at least one person in my audience will read it, and I don’t have time to rewrite it in a letter to him. Other issues around the household have absorbed my attention of late; because of their unresolved, tawdry, and emotionally exhausting nature, I don’t have much to say. All I will say is that tonight was the last chance to go to confession at our parish before the Triduum, and I showed up, after committing about 100 sins getting all the kids in the car, at the wrong time. In the next two days before we are going out of town for an Easter celebration and spring break trip to Texas, I might try to hunt down a church with sacraments for last minute penitents, but I’m also hoping that God will accept some of these trials as sufficient penance.



***

Thanks to our most loving mother, my sister and I were able to take a day trip to New Orleans sans enfants. We sat in on a couple of the Tennesee Williams literary festival talks, held in the Counting House at the beautiful Historic New Orleans Collection, a room that was painted wedgewood blue with near white trim. On the wall behind the lectern was an enormous portrait of three sisters in white Scarlet O’Hara dresses. I had a hard time keeping my eyes off them.

 

from www.hnoc.org

The wall to my left was also adorned with portraits from two centuries ago: a scowling older gentleman, the lady of the house, several young people, including a young girl who must have been the house maid. One dashing young man could have been a stand-in for Mr. Willoughby, with his dark tousled hair and flirtatious smile. Were these people actually related, or had the historical society collected some portraits and arranged them to indicate familial connections?

We also had time to spend wandering the streets of the French Quarter for a couple of hours. Browsed in a couple of shops pretending we might actually buy something. Stopped in for a sandwich at one little corner bistro but were overwhelmed by the patchouli, so we passed out again through the side door. Peeked around the Ursuline Convent, now a museum, and studied its intricate model of New Orleans, its reproductions of old Bibles, and its display of actual Episcopal jewels, which suggest that a great strength of humility is needed by the man who wears them to withstand the intoxication of power. The convent church was repainted in unfortunate pastels. The empty tabernacle indicated that it isn’t currently in use; unfortunately, it wasn’t repainted to represent the period during which the convent was flourishing. I noticed in the festival program that one of the presenters scheduled later in the weekend had written two books about the Ursulines, who settled in New Orleans nearly 3 centuries ago, and who must have represented order and peace in contrast with the bacchanalian pursuits indulged in a few blocks away. The partially tended garden, peopled by contemporary statues of southern spiritual leaders, scented with orange blossoms, and sprouting a few random herbs, suggested the peacefulness of the cloister that must once have thrived here. The visit to the convent was at least as instructive as the festival.

After visiting New Orleans on three separate occasions, the feeling of having arrived in a foreign land has faded a little. I feel like I can orient myself around the French Quarter: That way to the Mississippi River, the opposite way to the city park, which we only drove through, west to the Garden District, east back home. There is still much of the city to discover; I know we’ll be making a trip to do the Audubon zoo and insectarium at some point, and I’m daydreaming about a weekend trip with my husband after his return: we’ll check into one of the quaint little European style hotels a couple blocks up and over away from the shopping and bars. Then we’ll stroll at a romantic pace along the city streets for awhile before dining at one of the little bistros. The next day we’ll visit some churches and look for the oldest tombs at some cemeteries, before spending the rest of the afternoon at the art museum and picnicking in the city park. Maybe whoever is watching the kids could meet us there, so that we all could enjoy the little storybook theme park there.

I’m happy my mom and sister felt the instant enchantment of New Orleans on their first visit. You always want the people you love to love what you love. Like this picture.

Youth Serum

There is nothing for shaving 20 years off your age like sharing a bed with your sister. I finally had someone to put my ice cold feet on. Last night my visiting sister and I lay in my bed and whispered and giggled like we used to when we were afraid our mother would rap on the wall and tell us to quiet down. And maybe in the back of my mind, the little girl me was half afraid her half-awake mother, hair tousled into horns by sleep, was going to appear at the doorway and demand what in the world we were thinking. But we kept talking anyway until we became incoherent.



My sister and I look like two different sides of the family. If we were going to the Oscars, I would wear one of those simple, sleek column gowns like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d wear something with a little décolleté and feminine curves like Kate Winslet. But we often think alike: while flipping through one of her fashion magazines while we were talking with my mom, who came along to visit too, I paused at an ad that showed two bronzed beauties in expensive clothes at the beach with their arms draped over each other, one looking directly at the camera, the other staring off into the horizon. “Look, it’s you and me!” I said.



She laughed. Apparently on the drive down here, my mom was looking at the same magazine and held up that ad with a disgusted, “Look at this.” And my sister said, “It looks like me and Emily.” Of course, the magazine is trying to suggest the eroticism that my mom picked up on, not sisterly love, although the two models do look alike. And if my sister and I hung around the beach like that, I’m sure we would get some stares because we don’t look alike. But we have often lamented that the sisters in Jane Austen’s day were allowed to be much more affectionate without suspicion.



Not that suspicion has deterred my sister from harassing me with irritating shoulder squeezes. She does not mind attracting attention. But then she has always been the beauty and I the brains in our sisterly partnership. (Not that she’s not brilliant, too, of course.) As teenagers, she read fashion magazines, and I read our grandfather’s scholarly magazines. Two nights ago we stayed up late detailing some of our differences: she’s afraid of getting old and ugly; I’m afraid of getting old and senile. And our mother, who is the most youthful mother of 30somethings I know, assured us we were both wonderful. But, motherly affirmations aside, we shared our struggles with coming to terms with being nearly middle-aged and having such a long way to go in our spiritual lives, although we are happy to point out each other’s root sins.



This visit is going to be a short one. We are off to New Orleans today, with two carloads of children in tow, so we are going to eat beignets and window shop in the French Quarter, peek into churches and then play at the park. Meanwhile, my sister and I are plotting our return to the fabled city on Thursday, if we can figure out the logistics of leaving our mother with the 11 cousins, so that we can sit in on the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and learn the failproof method of writing a novel in six months.  If we had planned ahead at all, she should have used one of her free vouchers to fly down here just for that.

Dreams

I had a nightmare the other night, just before waking, one of those haunting dreams that lingers in recesses of consciousness. In the dream the kids and I were trying to get somewhere on foot, and we had to cross a highway. At first the only means appeared to be running across multiple lanes of speeding traffic, but then some plump older lady in flowing clothes pointed out that there was a pedestrian walkway a little further on. So we trudged over only to find that the pedestrian bridge had no railings. And it was about a 1000 miles up in the air over a cliff. But we started across, me holding the toddler, watching the other kids in front of me. I knew as I watched my five year old that he might fall off, but I had to hold the baby. And sure enough: As the five year old looks toward one side of the walkway, he walks in a diagonal right off the other side of the bridge. I watch him in slow motion go over the edge, flailing and crying, but I am frozen and can do nothing, except think, “I knew this was going to happen.” My older son runs into action and sees that there is a river next to the highway, and it looks like the five yr old is going to fall into the river. My older son figures we can run back down the cliff to rescue him from the water. Just as I finally am able to break free from catatonia and run back to the cliffside to slide down and see if I can pull him from the river, I wake up. In that liminal state I try to relive the dream and fix it: I hold his hand. I catch him before he drifts across the bridge. I am able to swim in the river and pull him out. All kinds of solutions. but for the rest of the day, I am fearful. The dog ran in front of a car. I almost had a panic attack.




I don’t need a psychotherapist to tell me why I had this dream: like all parents, I’m afraid of one of the kids dying, especially this accident prone kindergartner, who is so unhappy at school. I’ve had similar dreams where I am unable to protect all my kids, like one where our GMC slips off the side of a river bank into the water, and I can’t figure out how to get all of the kids out of the car to swim to safety. A dream interpreter would tell me that I’m afraid of drowning under my responsibilities or something like that. I see my children running ahead of me in life, and I can’t help them all.



It’s not only in dreams that I feel powerless to protect them all from accidents and my negligence. It is a condition of motherhood to feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of protecting not only our children’s bodies but also their souls. I realize that I need to trust more in God to protect them, that my limited abilities can only do so much. These dreams suggest I think I can do it all, instead of handing my fears to God.



I also want them to learn to take care of themselves, to become less dependent on me, to stop fighting over who gets to sit next to me at dinner, who gets to crawl into my bed in the morning, who gets to sit next to me on the couch… Too often I react snappily to these petty arguments. I don’t want to sit next to any of them when they are yelling and pushing each other. Lately their pranks and aggression and teasing have worn my patience to the nub. I need their father here to straighten them out.



The Darwins posted a bit ago about how men and women like to berate their spouses when in the company of their own sex. People also like to complain about their children to anyone who will listen. How many blogs are dedicated to detailing the antics of wild children? Years ago I resolved to try not to speak badly about my husband, but lately I’ve been trying not to complain about my children (except to my husband when he calls, and my parents…). The same habit of deception is at play: I end up believing what I say. And I don’t want their last memory of me as they fall off some cliff to be of a screaming mother. Praying for patience and trust.

Inquiries

A dark car with shaded windows has been prowling the neighborhood lately - driven by a spy of sorts. A federal agent has been asking the neighbors questions about my husband. The kids were thrilled to find the agent’s business card tucked in our door when we came home from school one day. They are convinced he’s a secret agent seeking clues to some conspiracy. But there is no conspiracy: the agent is just trying to establish my husband’s security clearance.

The problem is that my husband was rarely home in the six months he lived here before he deployed. All his local friends were co-workers and are gone with him. My next door neighbor, whom I trusted enough to give a key to the house to feed the guinea pigs while we were gone over Christmas, couldn’t recall a conversation with my man. So when the secret agent questioned her about my husband’s interests and activities, she had a tough time answering. He also asked her if she’s heard any arguments. I had to chuckle about her answer: she said she hadn’t heard anything but assumed that if we’ve been married long enough to have six kids, we’ve probably had an argument or two.


The agent has had an easier time finding references in Virginia, where we had a pretty active social life. I realized cleaning up  for company today – some of the wives and kids from the regiment are coming over, and then my mom and sister are coming Monday – that I hadn’t done nearly as much hospitality cleaning here as I did in VA. Having brown tiled floors helps minimize the effort. And with the kids in school, our schedule is fuller. But the truth is, we don’t have much company. It has been harder to break into the culture down here, where there are fewer military families, and a good percentage of people grew up here and have their families around. In fact the neighbor next door grew up here, literally, in this house, with her 5 other siblings. The youngest one is our landlord, who moved a few miles away. When I tell the kids’ friends’ parents how to get to the house, they say, “Oh I know where you live! You live in the Judge’s house!” Not only do most of his six kids live in the area, but so do a passel of their cousins, one of whom has babysat for us.



Some of the other military spouses complain about this inward looking community. But having grown up in a small town, and being a Wendell Berry fan, I can’t complain. No one has been unfriendly; people just have their blood relations to keep up with. Plus when I was taking the trash out the other night, the neighbor invited me over to join her little party around the chiminea. So I got to hear stories about Hurricane Katrina and have a drink.  And if anything, after revisiting Sense and Sensibility on audio tape, I’m motivated to write more letters to keep up with my kin, which I’ve lost the habit of doing. The Dashwood sisters write lovely letters – and criticize smartly less lovely epistles, such as those of Miss Lucy Steele.



The letter campaign between my husband and me has settled into a pattern after the initial delay in delivery – I drop a note in the mail on Mondays and get one back by the end of the week. A little stack of matching envelopes is growing in the drawer of my bedside table. They’ll be a record of these six months when our lives are running in different directions. Lives can go in different directions even when sharing a household, I realize; examples of alienation between people tied by vows or genes abound in literature and life, and a part of me wonders how well I myself would be able to answer the prying questions of our federal investigative agent (although because of my bias I won't be asked).  A part of every person's soul remains unknowable. But I hope that this separation will just be another bookmark in our lives, and not a major, identity-defining event, although I do wonder how long it will take to re-establish a two –parent family routine, once this is all over. I’m just thankful we’re not looking at a 10 month or more separation.

Ancient Prayer to St. Joseph

I can’t remember right now where I first came across this prayer to St. Joseph, which, according to the Tan book, Favorite Prayers to St. Joseph, dates back to the year 50 A.D. In 1505 Emperor Charles took it into battle, and so it is especially associated with the protection of soldiers. Reading this prayer and keeping it on your person is also supposed to protect you from sudden death, drowning, and being poisoned. So in honor of my deployed Seabee, here is the Ancient Prayer to St. Joseph, to be prayed nine mornings for anything you desire.



O St. Joseph, whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of God, I place in thee all my interests and desires.


O St. Joseph, assist me by thy powerful intercession and obtain for me all spiritual blessings through thy foster Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord, so that, having engaged here below thy heavenly power, I may offer thee my thanksgiving and homage.

O St. Joseph, I never weary contemplating thee and Jesus asleep in thine arms. I dare not approach while He reposes near thy heart. Press Him in my name and kiss His fine head for me, and ask Him to return the kiss when I draw my dying breath.

St. Joseph, Patron of departing souls, pray for me.

Lenten reading

Maybe I should be embarrassed to admit how much I am enjoying Peter Kreeft’s Prayer for Beginners, which is very short and elementary, but I’ve been reading it slowly, chewing on one chapter at a time. Is my prayer life so rusty that this little book grabbed my attention? This line got me: “Reading a book about doing something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives the impression of doing what you are only thinking about doing.” Guilty. In my head I know this, and most of what Kreeft writes is familiar, but my prayer life is easily derailed by telling myself things like “I’m doing lectio divina…”


So I’ve tried to read this little book slowly as a refresher course and practice what it says, although it is not really a “how to” manual, but an gentle prod to action: “…as Brother Lawrence would say, ‘practice his presence.’ . . .To pray is to know God by practicing his presence; and this is to live in reality, instead of in fantasy worlds we construct in our own minds, in which God is absent. One moment of prayer of weak worship, confused contrition, tepid thanksgiving, or pitiful petition will bring us closer to God than all the books of theology in the world.” This little book had laid around our house in its shrink wrap for years until a couple weeks ago. In fact it almost went in the give away pile before we moved, but I thought it might be helpful to the boys in a couple years. But it was me who needed the reminders. Maybe it is a little working of the Holy Spirit that I am only open to it right now.



Perhaps I am more open to its message because I have been going to an ecumenical Bible study at the Air Force base chapel that a friend invited me to attend. We are the only two Catholics, but there haven’t been any issues of denomination, other than the fact that we have a differently vocabulary, a different theological sense to words like “church” and “anointed.”


The first day I was confident, happy to be there, ready to share what I know. But after a couple of meetings, I no longer open my mouth so eagerly. I quickly learned that these women are powerhouses of prayer. You can tell they speak directly to God, and not to impress the other women at the study. Maybe it is because they have had to beg God for their lives that their prayer is so unselfconscious. For instance, I have gradually pieced together from what has been shared that our study facilitator, a happy, peaceful blond lady in the AF Reserves, was abused by her stepfather as an adolescent, had to go through the pain of accusing him in court, left home at a young age, and lived the high life for awhile before she finally gave her life to God. Her brother is still living life day to day, in and out of jail and the hospital, in need of prayer. Another lady, who is just as cheerful as a sunny day and who has the lilting accents of a proper Southern belle, has a husband who is a manic depressive substance abuser who drinks vanilla extract when he can’t find anything else. He has taken to sleeping with a gun and has ordered night vision goggles, but diagnoses other people’s illnesses for his day job. A third, instead of the drawl of the Southern belle, uses the two syllable vowels of someone from the backwoods to talk about her mama a lot. But she also has an advanced degree and has lived all over the US and in Europe with her husband who is an AF bigwig, while nursing her sickly children.



So behind the smiles and the genuine courtesy and kindness are some scars. And although I’m not sure any of them would articulate a “theology of suffering,” they seem clearly to have offered these pains to the Lord.



The topic of the study is hearing the voice of God, based on a study by Priscilla Shirer, who is the daughter of evangelical paster Tony Evans. To me, hearing the voice of God is the gift of saints and visionaries like Mother Teresa, people given a direct call. If I were asked a month ago if I hear the voice of God, I would’ve replied negatively. Of course, I don’t hear God’s voice: that’s the province of saints, and I’m no saint. But if nothing else, this study and this little book have been the highlights of my Lent, marked otherwise by glaring failures. (loved this quote from Anne: from her pastor, Fr. Dave Cooper in Milwaukee...“Flunking Lent is still a gift from God. When you do well following your Lenten observances, that isn’t goodness on your part. It is God who gave you the strength to do it. So, when you fail to have the strength to follow through on your Lenten observances, that too, is a gift from God.” ) If nothing else, they have me trying to quiet the distractions, silencing inner critics, preparing a space for God to work.

A prayer from St. Patrick, the extended version of his breastplate prayer, which begins:  "I arise today, through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the threeness, through confession of the oneness, of the Creator of Creation.. . ." 

Time to make Irish soda bread.