Links - Children, Christmas, and December

"Serviam":

And I told my son something I tell everybody, all the time, when they run into something confusing or disheartening about the way the Catholic Church is run: Honey, what did you expect? This is what it looks like when you have a universal church, a church that lets everyone in -- a church that wants everyone to come in. And that includes sticklers, ad libbers, scowlers, memo-missers, chiders, and the generally clueless. I guarantee you, it's just as chaotic and nutty behind the scenes at St. Peter's as it is in the sacristy of your typical shoestring parish.

But it can be frustrating, never knowing what to do, and never seeming to do it right, no matter how hard you try -- to the point where you might just say, "I don't want to do this anymore." I don't want to be a part of this. You can do it without me; I'm going to go back to my seat. This is what my son told me.

"A Mixture of December Thoughts":

My December wasn’t busy when I viewed it from the safety of Thanksgiving weekend. I could look at the calendar–mostly empty–and hope that in between the holiday shipping there would be time for some peace. If I look back at the calendar days I’ve just been through, they still look pretty empty, but I know that they were not. December is always like this, or at least it has been for the last several years. It is the unrelenting list of things to do, each one small but important.

"Killing Jesus: All Sins Are Not Equal":

Child killing is so bad all analogies fail and become foolish. Children are the closest humanity unredeemed can come to the Edenic state: as close to innocence, hope, and possibility as we can see in this mortal flesh. God placed it deep in our beings to protect and defend them at any cost.

Christmas this year is a season where children died, just as children died two-thousand years ago. A sick and twisted man killed the innocent in Connecticut in 2012 as a depraved and broken man killed them in 0.

Herod is dead, but his spirit lives: violent, hateful, twisted. Knowing it was Messiah, Herod wanted to kill Jesus. He was not mistaken or deceived: he heard glad tidings and decided to silence them.

"Little Joys" - This one is written by the father of quintuplets:

We're celebrating our babies and baby-ish things in this household (I admit, there are times when I just hold my head in frustration and think about crying). These babies are sure giving me a more intimate and raw perspective of the Christ story. The almighty God of this world bent so low as to incarnate Himself in the body of a tiny, helpless baby like one of my three little boys. What? Why? They can't talk! They can't really do anything without our help!

 Oh, the strange and awesome wisdom of our Lord. This Jesus experienced a full life just as we each do. He knows firsthand a stubbed toe, an incredible sunset, the joy of family, the smell of baked bread, the painful loss of a friend. He knows temptation to sin.

How amazing and humbling to know that He lived His whole life without sin, yet was tempted just as any of us. Can you imagine how incredibly hard it would be to successfully resist every time you are tempted to sin? Sinning is easy-- resisting temptation, that's when things get tough. Jesus had a tough life.

Operation Read Those Books, Day 20

(You can read more about Operation Read Those Books here.)

What did I read? Chapters 7-13 of Matthew Redmond's The God of the Mundane.  Yep! Ate up quite a few chapters!

What stood out? Well, when I read chapter 7, I thought, "I'm going to start tomorrow's blog by saying that chapter 7 is the real jewel of the book." But then I read chapter 9, and I knew I couldn't let chapter 7 hog the limelight, because chapter 9 was amazing.

So instead of going chapter by chapter - because there's so much good stuff! - I'm just going to excerpt a few of my favorite quotations.

Chapter 7 talked about St. Paul's command to the Thessalonians that they should "aspire to live quietly". I liked this observation:

This living quietly is not only ignored in the Church, it is rarely if ever seen as faithfulness. Not in this culture where the quiet is anathema. We Christians need to reckon with the fact that our tendency to not see a quiet/mundane life as legitimately spiritual comes from pride, a pride betrayed when we cannot be quiet about what we have done, and suffered, and seen. Ever.

Also, this:

Living quietly is a life so happy with the attention of God, that the attention of the world is not needed, and rarely enjoyed.

And:

It is grounded in the assurance of the notice of the Creator. 

Then there's chapter 9, which is a sort of extended analysis of It's A Wonderful Life. Redmond points out that everyone loves that movie, but no one actually wants to be George Bailey, toiling in obscurity, never living out his dreams. George Bailey had no idea of the actual worth of his life and actions. Redmond says:

Christians could learn a lot here. We are guilty of not knowing what all we have done. But actually, that is not where the real guilt lies, even if it is where we feel it. The actual guilt lies in our thinking because we do not know all that we have done, we must have done nothing. We assume some kind of godlike posture as if we know the ends and implications of all our actions, and then we make judgments based on them. Foolish, isn't it - this idea we have no significance because we have not seen it? We wallow in some kind of faux humility, never realizing that it is really ego that thinks, "If I cannot see it, it must not be here."

And I think I'll stop there, because I don't want to end up excerpting the whole book! But it reminded me of Christ's admonition to, "watch, therefore," because we don't know at what day or hour an accounting will be demanded of us. If we are always doing our regular duty, we'll always be ready to say "yes" when some more extraordinary duty is demanded of us. Redmond points out that Scripture is full of people who were called to something extraordinary, but that their calls found them while they were going about their ordinary duties: tending sheep, trying to have children, bringing lunch along with them when they went to hear a preacher, etc.  A good reminder.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell



(This book was an Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by the publisher — common practice in the industry. No payment was accepted in exchange for a review or mention, and the reviewer was in no way obligated to review the book favorably.)

Operation Read Those Books, Days 18 & 19

(You can read more about Operation Read Those Books here.)

Again, I'm not behind on my reading, just on my blogging! Here's the report from Days 18 & 19:

What did I read? Chapters 3-6 of Matthew Redmond's The God of the Mundane.

What stood out to me? In these chapters, Redmond begins to argue that we all "push back against the Fall" by doing our given work. Plumbers by fixing pipes, doctors by treating the sick, etc.

I like this idea. With all the death and destruction and sin in the world, making things right and neat and whole again is a step in the fight against evil. Good food, clean homes, fertile farmland . . . this is the stuff of life. And the product of faithful living.

My one quibble - and this isn't the author's fault - is that this might be a dangerous book for a Jonah. You know, for someone who is called to dangerous, radical ministry and who is inclined to run away. Redmond's very clear that there are people called to missions and such, but I think if you have that call and find that call hard, this isn't the book for you.

But I don't think he's writing to those people. For people like the rest of us, who are called to serve God in very ordinary circumstances? This book presents exactly the discussion we need to hear. I'm really enjoying it and, I think, profiting from it.

btw, I noticed my friend Michelle, over at Liturgical Times just reviewed The God of the Mundane, too. Check it out!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell



(This book was an Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by the publisher — common practice in the industry. No payment was accepted in exchange for a review or mention, and the reviewer was in no way obligated to review the book favorably.)

Operation Read Those Books: Day 17

(You can read more about Operation Read Those Books here.)

(Parenthetical note #2: This is actually yesterday's entry - I'm not behind on my reading, just my blogging!)

Yesterday I began reading The God of the Mundane, by Matthew B. Redmond. First off, I love the cover! Especially the tag:

A Breath-Taking Escape from the Fantastical!

Perfect!

And now that I've remarked on the wrapping, let's go on to the content.

What did I read? The intro and the first two chapters.

What struck me? The questions Redmond asks. Here's the heart of it:

Is there a God . . . for those who are not changing anything but diapers? Is there a God for those who simply love their spouse and pour out rarely-appreciated affection on their children day after day? Is there a God for the mom who spends what feels like God-forsaken days changing diapers and slicing up hot dogs? Is there a God for the men who hammer out a day's work in obscurity for the love of his wife and kids? Is there a God for just and kind employers? Generous homemakers? Day-laborers who would look at a missons trip to Romania like it was an unimaginable vacation?

It's a really good set of questions. It's also, as the author points out, the kind of questions most of us ask at some point. What if we're not doing something spectacular for God? What if we're just . . . ordinary?

Redmond confesses to having been a preacher who preached the kind of sermons that made people feel guilty for not going on the mission field, for not doing something extraordinary and crazy and radical for Christ. And, he observes now:

It never felt right but it preached well.

That was the line that struck me the most. Because I know exactly what he means. Those calls sound exactly right, but they never feel right.

Reading that made me wonder: why? I think it's because the message is half-right: we are called to live completely committed lives, radically devoted to the cause of Christ, but we are also all called to serve different roles within the church.

I think the kind of sermon Redmond is talking about misses the second part. If everyone was a missionary, where would the support be? Or, even more close to home, if everyone was a preacher, where would the vestry be? (And the nursery workers, and the altar guild, and the choir members, etc.?)

I do think we are all supposed to say, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord: let it be to me according to your word." But that word is going to be different for each of us.

Takeaway? I really appreciated the opportunity to think about the question of where God is to be found in our day-to-day lives. It reminded me a bit both of The Practice of the Presence of God, and Milton's sonnet, "On His Blindness" (i.e., "They also serve who only stand and wait").

I'm interested to see what conclusions he reaches further on in the book. And I think there might be a hint in his words near the end of the second chapter:

We think the small, mundane, ordinary things we do each and every day are worth nothing before God because they are worth nothing before the gods of this world.

A hint that we might be wrong? I think so.

Peace of Christ,
Jessica Snell




(The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued new rules that went into effect on December 1, 2009. These rules state that product reviewers on blogs must disclose whether they received review products for free or received monetary payment for such reviews.

This book was an Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by the publisher — common practice in the industry. No payment was accepted in exchange for a review or mention, and the reviewer was in no way obligated to review the book favorably.)

Operation Read Those Books: Days 12-15

(You can read more about the Operation Read Those Books project here.)

I meant to write a catch-up post yesterday, but ended up just listening to the news out of Connecticut and crying. Lord have mercy on those poor families.

So . . . today I caught up and finally finished reading about Pytheas. Now my mind is spinning with images of amber and Iceland and the library at Alexandria.

What did I read? Chapters 5-8, which covered:
-Pytheas' exploration - by boat and on foot - of Britain
-the likelihood that Pytheas made it to Iceland
-the amber trade
-what happened to Pytheas' manuscripts after he wrote them

Verdict?
I enjoyed this book. It got a little tedious at times only because I didn't share the author's interest in mathematics and astronomy, but my shortcomings are hardly his fault. My only other criticism is that this book could have been vastly improved by more and better maps. The illustrator/cartographer produced really sloppy, impressionistic maps rather than accurate, well-lettered ones, and that made it harder than it should have been to follow the author's detailed descriptions.


I was struck by how following just one subject - in this case, Pytheas - in detail can illuminate a score of other topics. This book covered geography, burial customs, sailing ships, map-making, astronomy, archeology, the nature of scholarship both in modern and ancient times, and many other subjects, all because the author was trying to illuminate the life of one man.


The project
In other news, I'm really enjoying this Operation Read Those Books project. I'm going to have to continue it on past December, especially as I keep adding new books to my currently-reading shelf. But regularly reading non-fiction feels like it does good stuff to my brain, and I want to keep up the habit. 


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Links

"Guns, Football, and Fornication":

Perhaps, society should discourage sex outside of marriage and making babies outside of marriage as ideals. We all admit that many will not live up to the ideals, but that would not make them worse. Social pressure does have some impact after all.

"Semiannual Gluttony Retrospective, Pt. I":

Because one thing I've learned through the past four years is that there are eating disorders that keep you fat and eating disorders that keep you thin, but they're still disorders. There are gluttonies that keep you fat and gluttonies that keep you thin, but both are no good way to live.

"Editing the Soul":

In a way, examining your conscience is very much like being a good editor. Editors are trained to spot and ferret out what is objectively unacceptable in a manuscript. But the best editors do more than just mark up the page with red ink, noting all the errors. This is only helpful in the most limited way, and it may very well lead the writer, especially if they're the delicate genius type, to despair. Instead, a good editor will try to figure out what the author was actually trying to say when they went astray; and they help them to make corrections and draw out something better.

"Of Women and the Freedom to be Holy":

. . . but there is, at least, here in her masterpiece work, an appreciation of what Christianity alone provided women in the 18th and 19th centuries: the freedom to be human. Safie is, after all, seeking only to be allowed to pursue virtue, to learn, to deepen her soul, and to marry a man she loves. She knows that it is only a Christian nation that can provide that freedom for her.

This is a part of the Christian story, a part of the Bible itself, that I think we’ve too often forgotten to tell, bowing, in our own way, to the common modern idea that Christianity is, at its core, oppressive to women. Instead of fighting back tooth and nail we most often answer only that Christian wives and mothers are very happy, or that women want the strong manly leaders our churches encourage. And that’s really not the story we need to be telling.

Operation Read Those Books: Day 11

(You can read about Operation Read Those Books here.)

What Did I Read Today? Chapter 4 of Pytheas the Greek: "The Lure of Tin".

Tell us something interesting about it: Apparently the tin near Britain formed when a massive batholith cooled and became granite, and the cooling process altered the sedimentary rocks around it, producing tin, wolfram, copper, lead, and zinc, in ever-widening circles around it.

See? I'm learning things I never knew.

That's pretty cool, actually, the idea of a giant molten hunk of rock, hundreds of kilometers long, forcing its way up through the earth and sending up spikes of even more molten rock, then cooling off gradually, and the heat and material radiating off it creating these layers and layers of metals that man would then mine for centuries. Such a gigantic, important, completely unobservable process. It's amazing to think about.

But what did the author seem to find interesting? Okay, the charming thing about Cunliffe is how much he seems to love imagining his hero Pytheas observing, in real-time, all the sites he himself has researched through painstaking archaeological methods. He's scholar enough to always remind himself, "I can't be sure he was actually here, that he actually saw this," but I love how enchanted he is by the idea. It gives me a real feeling for why people go in to the field of archeology: they've got great imaginations and they're people-fascinated.

Or at least that's what I'm getting from his narration.


Tomorrow: Pytheas reaches the mysterious realm of Britain! I can't wait.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell