A few good quotes

Going through old papers - love this quote:

“Every experience of beauty points to infinity” – Hans Urs Von Balthasar

I just need to remind myself to look for those moments of beauty, like the great storm that blew through yesterday after days of drought, and not let myself get bogged down in the particulars as we get deeper into the moving process.  For instance, I've been hunting for days a lost address book. I'm fretting about the flight times.  I can't decide which photo albums to store, if any.  Meanwhile, the days are flying by - our packers come next week. Yikes!

Happily, we took the time last night to escape on a little date.  Our friends were giving a talk on marriage for Theology on Tap, so we left the kids with a movie and went to the gourmet pizza place to hear their spiel. We were practically the oldest people there, but we tried to blend in. And even though we've been married almost as long as our friends, it's always good to hear someone else's perspective on what makes a marriage work, especially when we're in the midst of a trying time.  Our friends talked mostly about their experiences, which were interesting since they come from different backgrounds, but the gems I am holding on to are these quotes: "This too shall pass" and "You have to practice daily conversions." Very apropos to our situation.

The other highlight of the week so far was the visiting Irish priest's homily on Sunday.  We went to a later Mass than usual to meet our older boys, returning from their retreat with 48 other teens, and their renewed spirits energized the congregation.  Then the priest gave one of those homilies that makes you want to stand up and shout "Amen."  I wish I could remember more of it, but he started out with quotes from William Butler Yeats and Thomas Kinsella on aging:  Kinsella's "Mirror in February":

"Now plainly in the mirror of my soul

I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ."

And from Yeats, I think it was from "When You are Old":

"But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;"

Anyway, since it was the Feast of Corpus Christi, he spoke about being incarnated and about the importance of physical symbols (used a story about how the abused jr. gestapo youth, when they were being rescued from the streets after the war, couldn't sleep unless they held a piece of bread), but how we also have to feed our souls.  It was all very eloquent, but now my brain is not working well enough to remember more. So back to trying to practice detachment.

Random Quick Takes

Quick takes for a Friday afternoon...

1. What is it about being the second daughter? My older daughter loves soccer, swimming, and plays legos and playmos with her brothers. My younger girl, on the other hand, is very interested in kissing and romance. She paints her nails without permission. She does her own hair with bows and flowers. She rolls over the waistband of her shorts to make them shorter. She giggles when mom and dad kiss. She asked for a bra last night at the dinner table. She’s five. Her aunt, also a second daughter, did stuff like this. Truth in birth order.

2. All of my kids just finished participating in a summer drama production of Snow White. It has been the ideal summer activity because all six kids were involved, the cost was minimal, and it required only a couple hours of participation a few days a week, so it made us feel like we were doing something without taking up all our time. Everyone who tried out got a part, although the older boys just wanted to be the set crew. The youngers have loved getting dressed up and performing. Do we have a future in performance arts? I think not. They seem to think that “Use expression” means speak louder.

3. Moving. Yes, we are moving still. I should not be sitting here typing. I should be organizing, shredding, disposing, cleaning, calling … But I can’t focus right now. We’ve done our medical, physical, and vision screening. We’ve received vaccinations. We’ve sold our washer and dryer and one of our cars. We have passports. The first round of packers came this morning and left with some kitchen stuff, linens, a few toys and books, and our bikes. That’s our fast shipment, the stuff that will console us while we hang out in temporary lodging until we find a place to live. Next Friday the storage packers come, and the following week the big truck arrives, and a crew will spend about 3 days packing and loading the rest of the junk. We do not have plane tickets. We do not have a place to stay when we get there, although we should have base housing within a month -- housing that is about 1000 sq. ft. smaller than what we have. I still have to place a hold on the mail and call the utilities. We still have too much stuff. And I’m having trouble throwing away used pencils and school notebooks.


4. My older sons are on a retreat. My oldest asked if he should pack his “Levi’s.” Only he pronounced it with a short e sound, like a levy. Should I be relieved that he’s so clueless about fashion at 14 – or worried? I guess his baby sister can keep him up to date.

5. Our other activity these first few weeks of summer, besides drama and the drama of moving, has been summer soccer for the youngers. It’s 100 degrees with 90% humidity, and they are out there running around like ants for an hour. My 6 year old scored 12 goals in his last game. His team won 14 to 1. The other team scored during the quarter my son was sitting out. I probably should have asked the director if he could play up in the 7-9 year old league because he turns 7 in a couple of weeks, but by that time the season is over. Although I’m proud of him for playing so well, it’s a little embarrassing. He isn’t even being a ball hog – he passes it when he can. But he’s like a magnet for the goal. And he has been practicing with his older brothers.

6. Decided to home school the four youngers. They asked to be homeschooled, although the 6 year old thinks he’s going to have more time to play, and the 8 year old thinks she’s going to have more time for snacks. But it’s a good excuse to keep some books; I just hope I will not get distracted by too many options, or discouraged by reluctant scholars.

7. Sorting through mementoes, letters, notes, photos, etc. Where did the time go – both the years, and the hours consumed by nostalgia? Taking a break to sit by the neighbors’ pool, finish reading The Penderwicks at Point Mouette (escapism at its best!), and watch the kids splash. Don’t expect much from this blog in the next few weeks.

from http://www.jeannebirdsall.com/about/point_mouette.html

Another book about books and reading for spiritual growth

Sometimes it’s hard to justify time spent reading novels and other books, especially when I have a list a couple pages long of things that need to be done. Instead of full bookshelves, I could have a clean house, or have made some nice handcrafts, or I could be in better shape, or have a more interesting blog. I also would be a nicer person if I didn’t stay up late to finish my latest library find. Of course, a lot of my reading is crammed into little pockets of time spent waiting for kids or waiting for appointments or hiding in the bathroom, so that time would have been empty if not filled with reading, but occasionally I feel like I have to apologize for the hours I spend between covers.


Which is why I nabbed Nancy Malone’s Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading when I saw it on the end of the library shelf. Once I wrote a paper on the sacramentality of reading, so when I saw the subtitle, I again kicked myself on not doing something with that paper, although in reality it was a rambling mess that probably bordered on heretical.


Malone’s book is primarily a memoir of a reading life. Her story is interesting – she is an Ursuline nun who found healing in books after struggling with a midlife dark night of the soul that turned into alcoholism. But I picked up Malone’s book to find theological arguments for why it is okay to read instead of doing the dishes in the evening. And I found some good evidence. Malone doesn’t just provide a story about how reading changed her in multiple ways, although reading was a means of conversion, similar to St. Augustine’s “take and read” moment. She also makes a case for reading, not spiritual books, but novels and biographies, as a form of meditation and participation in the communion of saints.


It’s a pretty easy conclusion to make: Reading and meditation resemble each other – you are alone, silent, still, attentive, engaged:

"These moments of wholeness, experienced sometimes in reading, sometimes in prayer, give us hints at what can be said about spirituality and reading, about a spirituality of reading. Such is the human condition, however, that even when we devote ourselves entirely to a book (or to prayer) we don’t bring a completed, finished self to it. Think, for instance, of the novels that spoke to you when you were eighteen, that you regard as superficial or exaggerated now. Or think of revisiting one of the classics, only to discover a different, deeper book than the one you read decades ago. It’s not the books that have changed. It is you yourself".

So reading, even when it doesn’t seem to change you outwardly, can still effect a conversion – the soul engaged in reading is in motion, a soul growing, not stagnating.


Malone also points out how, like contemplative prayer, reading takes us out of ourselves. It engages us in conversation with another mind, who instructs and refines our way of thinking. She uses the image of the labyrinth to describe the search for the “true self” in the sense of Thomas Merton’s usage as God within, a search that is circular and that moves both inward and outward toward others. Reading should be a conversation between the self and others - “an exchange of selves” with the book, the author, the characters, the people who read that book. It should force us to ask questions and reflect to understand, to become “discerning, responsible readers.” This questioning pulls us out of ourselves. In the total immersion of reading, we transcend ourselves. Malone clarifies: “what I mean by a spirituality of reading – the search for the true self in reading, for the self that sees the world with the faith that Jesuit Bernard Lonergan calls ‘the eye of love.’”

It’s not a hard argument to make, that books teach us to love. When we enter into the world of a book, we see with someone else’s eyes. We become more compassionate. Writers create worlds with their words, and we become co-creators in our imaginations. We form relationships with our books when we spend time with them. Books become our friends; they help us enter into the communion of saints. Words take flesh, as Malone points out – a kind of transubstantiation. Even secular reading can be a religious experience in this sense. Malone particularly likes biographies because they “refract the mystery of a human life, with its challenges, accomplishments, failures, and suffering, and a human personality in its ineluctable givenness.” They answer the question of what life is about.


Malone continues to compare reading to contemplative prayer when she writes about how reading teaches us to avoid distraction. I loved this quote: “A good book can create a little hermitage for some people anywhere, even in an airport waiting room.” And this one from Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy – “The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity; it must learn to waste time for the sake of God. . . . it must learn not to be continually yearning to do something, to attack something, to accomplish something useful, but to play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God.” When we’re reading a good book, we aren’t yearning to be doing something else; we’re totally involved in the story. All of our senses are engaged.

And when our senses are engaged, we are delighting in creation. Good writing gives us pleasure; it teaches us to love like Augustine’s love for God from Confessions:

“What is it that I love when I love my God? … It is a certain light that I love and melody and fragrance and embrace that I love when I love my God – a light, melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the God-within, where, for my soul, that shines which space does not contain; that sounds which time does not sweep away; that is fragrant which the breeze does not dispel; and that tastes sweet which, fed upon, is not diminished; and that clings close which no satiety disports – this is what I love when I love my God.”

Malone also tells how Ignatius of Loyola found spiritual consolation as from reading the life of Christ – it energized him for missionary work, while romances sapped his spirit, and left him lethargic. She also recounts Virginia Woolf’s story from her essay “How One Should Read a Book” about how St. Peter gives out rewards to different saints, but when he sees a reader, he comments that Heaven has nothing to offer people who have loved to read.

Malone remarks on some of the pleasures of reading: intellectual, humor, sensual, the “joy of recognition.” She sees herself in characters from Middlemarch, and in a book about an alcoholic I’m unfamiliar with: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. Books create connection. “Books contain both our memories and our hopes, shape them, in some cases create them.” Wayne Booth puts it like this in The Rhetoric of Fiction: “There is a pleasure from learning the simple truth, and there is pleasure from learning that the truth is not simple.” We enjoy insights into human complexity. We enjoy grammatically complex language that reflects our complexity.


And sometimes we’re like Kafka, and like books that shake us: Kafka recommends books “That bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as thought we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Even if some books do not change us themselves, they help us see how life changes us. We recognize truth in statements like Zossima’s observation that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams” from The Brothers Karamazov.

This delight in recognition and in the beauty and unity of a story is a spiritual delight. Imagination is necessary both for reading and faith. Great writers are part of “so great a cloud of witnesses” -- “they have finely observed and given testimony to the mysteries of life and personality to motive, intention, and action, to passion and suffering and death, to love and hatred, to hope and fear, to evil, to bliss, to the beauty of nature and our powerlessness under its ravages, to our struggle with human movements and institutions, to our search for meaning and the good, and some of them, explicitly, to our search for God.”

Reading gives us “Hope that there is a God whose extravagant fecundity is the source of the mysterious creative impulse of the artists among us. That there is in life the kind of wholeness achieved in a great work of literature – a master narrative in which, though we cannot always see how, your story and mine have their part.”

Since reading is often a contemplation of love, it helps us to be in love. Malone quotes Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk in lecture “the Human Condition”: “If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love, then we have more work to do, because that is who we really are.” Reading and writing help us love without restrictions, to see with “the eye of love.”

******************************************************

As I was reading this book, I also learned about some trials that some friends are experiencing – one a sick child, the other a philandering husband. I don’t know that either of these friends are big readers. But it crossed my mind that if I were in their situations, books would be my props to keep standing. I remember writing in my high school journal once after reading some book about adultery that I thought that I would be able to forgive my husband for infidelity because so many people fail in so many ways. I think whatever I had read gave me some tortured understanding about the capacity of the soul for sin and redemption. Maybe the book I had read made the communal devastation of a failed marriage seem worse than remaining in a marriage in which trust had been compromised. Maybe reading had made me feel that no person is deserving of complete trust. We all fail in that. Only God never betrays us. Even when He allows us to suffer pains like a child who is ill. And stories help us deal with these pains, both by giving us a framework to fit our experience into and by giving us examples of others who have suffered and survived, and by giving us other worlds to hide in while we're suffering.

Happy Father's Day

I'm blessed to know a few good men.

Books for sale . . . or not

While cleaning out my closet in preparation for this move, I came across a box of books I had shoved in the back corner. I had no shelf room for these books, so they stayed in the box in which they travelled from Virginia. Now here they are in a corner of my room, waiting for their fate to be decided.

I know the rule about “if you haven’t used it or loved it in a year (or two or three), get rid of it.” I haven’t looked into most of these books since about 1995, although I used to have shelf space for them and enjoyed looking at their covers.


Among the authors: Kant, Spinoza, Descartes, Cassirer’s History of the Enlightenment, Freud’s Introductory Lectures, Nietzche, Heidegger, Emanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt. Just typing those names makes me feel elevated. I kept them thinking, “Someday I might reread these. Or my kids might want to read them.”


But I won’t. And they probably won’t either. Well, they might page through the Freud looking for the dirty parts that don’t exist in these lectures.

Honestly, I can’t even remember what’s inside these books. When I open the cover, I see the notes I made, but I don’t remember the relevance of the lines I underlined. I don’t even remember the distinctions between the different philosophers. I readily acknowledge that I am never going to go back and reread Kierkegard or Kant.


So why can’t I give these books away? When my sister-in-law was here, I offered her some of my books. She picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Wait, I really liked that book, back in 1991, when I read it last. I might need it. How about if you just borrow it? Take some of my philosophy texts? NOooooooo. How about some worn out children’s clothes instead? But wait, I might want to treasure that little baby girl dress a little longer. . .

If I keep these books, will I be retaining a bit of the college student I once was? Will I maintain a certain elan if I have these books on my shelf? The problem is not only that I don’t have enough shelves, but that that student is long gone. Why is it so hard to let go? Stripping away the accretions of the last few years is more painful than plucking eyebrows. This stuff represents a certain identity I don’t have anymore. And the possibility of an academic identity that I will never achieve. I need to make a clean break. Detachment, detachment! one side of my mind keeps chanting. The other side whines, but I love this!


To give my mind a rest, I started reading a couple library books, the last books I’m going to check out. Not a help in my determination to get rid of the equivalent of one box of books. After reading the refreshing Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins, I felt reassured that having 2 or 3 thousand books is an admirable goal, unreadable though they may be. Collins moves that many or more across the ocean, and then picks up a few more while in England. He writes about all these remaindered and discarded books rotting away in the little English town of Hay-on-Wye, which is apparently the used book capital of the world. He and his wife go there to live, but they can’t find a house they can afford to maintain on their writer incomes. They wistfully look at old, abandoned homes, abandoned books, abandoned churches and graveyards.  The ruins of the past are quickly being paved over to make room for new developments, despite the tenacity that the residents of Hay exhibit in preserving old books.

Collins' book itself is probably doomed to be remaindered, as Collins acknowledges. It’s an interesting little memoir of a quirky place and its people and the books that have come to rest there, many to be reduced to ashes. It has some great quotes from obscure authors. For example, from a letter to Emily Dickinson from her friend Helen Hunt Jackson, who wrote a fictionalized biography of Dickinson: “When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy.” That bites a bit.


Collins celebrates the serendipity of coming across a brilliant but forgotten bit of writing in the stacks and piles of antiquarian bookstores. He seems especially interested in bits that reveal the eccentric history of science and medicine. But he also is interested in preserving bits of humanity, which I suppose is what all books are about. When he goes to visit his dying British grandmother, he notices a resemblance between his ancestor and his son:

“Something is being saved here: a certain shape of the earlobe, a peculiarly elfin expression during sleep. These come from my grandmother’s side of the family. Her grandmother left them to her when she died, as did her grandmother, going back generations into Gaul and Wales and back up to whatever godforsaken steppe or glacier my ancestors crawled away from. We have saved these tokens of humanity. Are they worth saving? Do they mean anything? Maybe not. They just are. But I wonder – perhaps the sight of family, the family look, is some consolation to my grandmother. Like every generation before her, she has passed some faint trace of herself along.”

Collins’ book is something of himself for his son. And if my children ever read the books I read, they’ll have something of me. A communal knowledge, as it were. But do I want to saddle my kids with a bunch of stuff they don’t want? Collins’ book wouldn’t be one I would pass on; if I had bought this book instead of borrowing it, I don’t think I would have too much trouble putting it in the discard pile after reading because one reading consumes what it has to give. Although it does give leads to books to keep an eye out for. I particularly like this quote from a favorite book of Collins’, Recreations of a Country Parson, which was published anonymously in 1861, but written by Andrew Boyd, a parson’s son. Collins reads this book to fall asleep because it is calming. On reading books about beautiful homes, Boyd writes,

“Therein lies the salt of such of book. The enjoyment of all things beyond eating and drinking arises out of our idealizing them. Do you think a child who will spend an hour delightedly in galloping round the garden on his horse, which is a stick, regards that stick as a mere bit of wood? No: that stick is to him instinct with imaginings of a pony pattering feet and shaggy man, and erect little ears. It is not so long since the writer was accustomed to ride on horseback in that inexpensive fashion, but what he can remember all that the stick was; and remember too how sometimes fancy would flag, the idealizing power break down, and from being a horse the stick became merely a stick, a dull, wearisome, stupid thing. And of what little things imagination, thus elevating and enchanting them, can make how much!"

Then again, maybe “Sixpence House” would be worth rereading . . . good thing it has to go back to the library, so I don’t have to decide whether it stays or goes.

No longer a baby

Saturday morning I woke up and found a little face pressed into the pillow next to me, soft breath undisturbed by the movement of my eyelids. Noted freckled nose, rosebud mouth, flyaway blond wisps. Should have let her sleep, but had to wake my youngest with five kisses on the morning of her birthday, even though she had overtaken my bed, her long legs sprawled across its width, while I was scooched over to the far side. How could my baby have gotten so long? She has stretched out over the spring, and now is suddenly in the league of bigger kids.

I miss having a baby to cuddle, but I am also enjoying having children who are more self-sufficient. I like that they come to me because they want to, not just because they need something from me, although that is the usual reason. I think I thought life would be easier when the kids were bigger, but the parenting challenges are no less rigorous even though these more independent children don’t need to be held all the time. Only on the morning of their birthdays.


I wasn’t planning to have a birthday party for this young lady turning five, but a friend was packing out, so I invited her two girls over, and then figured why not invite a few more? So five little girls, aged five, came over for an impromptu tea party. I wasted a bunch of time debating whether or not to use my grandmother’s pink china, but figured I might as well use it if I’m going to store it. And then I wasted more time making pink cream cheese sandwiches on thin white bread cut into hearts, cucumber squares, jello shapes, scones, fruit with pink marshmellowy dip, and flower cupcakes, all of which were thrown over with a request for peanut butter and jelly from one young lady, and then from four more. The tea was passed over in favor of lemonade. The cupcakes were fingered and mouthed and then thrown away – probably a stick and a half of butter and 3lbs of confectioners sugar in the trash. But the girls smiled and shrieked and chased each other around the house and no one got hurt and nothing got broken and everyone had a marvelous time. Not so much wasted after all.

The table with PB & J, fine china, silver, cloth napkins

The cupcakes. Meant to make little bees out of lemon drops and almond slivers but lost the black icing. One mom asked if the girls decorated them - humbling.

Untouched food at the end of the meal.

Happy Flag Day, too! This one flies over Ft. Massachusetts on Ship Island

A belated Mother's Day thought

I am 38 years old, and still I wake up some mornings thinking “I want my mom.” I wanted my mom when I was sick (with mono it turned out) while working as a camp counselor while in college, when I was pregnant, nursing and chasing a toddler all at once, and later when my kids were giving me trouble of the emotional variety and their dad was 10000 leagues away. Now I want my mom to come and help me pack and tell me what I need to do to move, even though I’ve done this 8 or 9 times now. My husband is a great help and efficient at getting things done. But there’s a different kind of comfort that Mom provides. I don’t think I will ever stop wanting my mom to tell me everything is going to be okay.



When my siblings and I hit adolescence and were relentless in giving our mom a hard time, not just with our bad behavior but with our catty comments about her appearance and actions, we secretly still wanted her to come and tuck us in at night. Or at least to come in and announce “Lights out means no talking.” My kids are starting to tease me in a similar fashion. They love to point out signs of aging and to comment on what a nerd I was in school and how out of touch I am now. We called my mom chubby and old and mean. We liked to catch her in small acts of hypocrisy. We worked on her weaknesses. Meanwhile she overlooked ours – or rather, loved us in spite of them.

In reality she was the prettiest mom around. Even now, when she come to visit and help out (thanks, Mom!), she still gets compliments from my friends about how pretty and put together and cheerful she is. She may have affected a different voice for certain company, but who doesn’t? Now I wonder if what really pained her was not the direct teasing, but the meanness we wrecked on each other. As a mother I finally understand how the daily antagonism between siblings breaks your heart.

I wonder if I lived closer to my mother if I would wake up and think “When can I get away from my mother?” which is what I thought when I was an teenager and yearned to go far far away to college. I imagined living in a garret with the rats and my books after college, part Sarah Crewe, part … Jo March? Jim Burden? I wanted to distance myself from the person I was and take on a new identity independent of my roots. I wanted to be someone interesting and clever, not someone from a small town with a relatively normal, uninteresting family.


I outgrew that dream pretty quickly. And now I envy those African mothers from Babies and the Asian mothers like Amy Tan’s who shoehorn several generations into one home. Someone else around to remind the siblings to be kind to one another, to say someday you’ll all be best friends, would be nice. A book review in the WSJ a couple weeks ago described the importance of a mother to different siblings. (May 28-29) Please Look After Mom by a Korean, Kyung-Sook Shin, is the book. The review by Pico Iyer, who lives in Japan, makes the point that the book is topically about a Korean siblings whose country mother gets lost when she comes to visit them in the city, but the theme of our relationship to the past and to tradition is what is at the core. The siblings have left behind their past and mocked their mother, but when she is missing they realize how dear she is, or what an effect she has had on the people they have become – or so I assume, not having read the book. This is one of Iyer’s closing thoughts: “The largest split across the globe today is not between Islam and the West, or between China and the United States, but between cultures of the future and those of the past, often within the same country (even within the same family).”


Without mothers nearby, physically or in spirit, the connection between past and future is lost. And with it, a surfeit of love and assurance that only mothers can provide