The Quotidian Reader

Keeping House Book Study Chapter 6

2012-01-16T05:14:00.000-08:00

(vintage kitchen by janet hill)

This is chapter 6 of Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life and is about Food to Eat.

"Food is so daily".

And because of that, it has a lot of significance to us as human being. In the Bible, food is the occasion of the first sin, and food also becomes intrinsically connected with our salvation, prefigured in the Passover meal and in the manna in the desert, and then in the feeding of the five thousand, and finally coming to full significance in Jesus's declaration that He is the Bread of Life.    We are called upon as Christians to "feed the hungry"

This chapter is divided up into four aspects of food -- the eating of it, the food itself, the preparation of it, and who we eat with.    Since I have been up in Alaska visiting my mom I have been comparing how flexible and yet continuous these things are.

My mom likes to have things nice -- not rigidly perfect, just pretty nice. She uses line-dried cotton or linen tablecloths and cloth placemats and napkins. When I first came up here, since we were both ladies and we both eat fairly simply, we set out very simple meals three times a day. But she has a lot of habits that keep even simple meals a ceremonial and pleasant occasion. We set the table, we moved the food from cooking dish to serving dish, and we sat down to say a grace and eat. My mom watches the news before dinner but always turns off the TV before sitting down to eat.   We make sure to have prepared a balance of fruit and vegetables, a wholegrain food and some meat or cheese or eggs.    We usually prepare the meals together, dividing up the little tasks.

In contrast, my boys' apartment in Eugene doesn't yet have a regular table and meals have to be plentiful and are often much less ceremonious. They often eat in or around the kitchen and we use that chance to talk and sort of interact.

And I noticed that when my brother showed up here, things were varied again.    My brother loves to cook (who knew?) and so he politely holds on to the kitchen proceedings and gets everything set up and prepared before calling us to eat.   Since he's a pastor he has often been reading a Psalm or improvising a grace since he showed up.

What I am thinking is that food, its preparation and what it is and who serves it, and how it is served and eaten, are a very interesting mixture of individuality and commonality.   You probably can get a better idea of a family or society culture by watching how the meal is prepared and served and eaten, than almost any other way.

Meals are also a kind of teaching and learning through action.   But it's not the directly didactic kind of teaching; it's more like a teaching by participation.

So, perhaps a good time to reflect on meals you have partaken of in past years, what they said about what was going on, how these occasions look in your own family, and what you would like them to look like.     Since it's the New Year, it's a good time to reflect on your systems and what direction you want them to go in. Any other reflections or rabbit trails on this chapter would also be welcome!

Photos from Wasilla

2012-01-16T04:37:00.000-08:00

I realized that I missed posting last week's Keeping House book study.     I have been up in Alaska -- my mom's health has taken a rather sudden turn for the worse and that has kept me preoccupied enough so that I haven't been online much at all.

Any prayers would be very much appreciated!

It has been breathlessly cold here -- down to minus 25 last night -- so I haven't been out much, but I took some pictures of the sunset last night through the upstairs window of her house.     The pictures are slightly blurry through the glass and don't do justice to the colors, but you can get an idea of the beauty -- the sunsets this far north come very early and last a long, long time especially since the sun has to sink below the mountains.

That little light in the second and third pictures? It's someone enjoying their Martin Luther King weekend by ski-mobiling on the frozen lake! Everyone has their own choice of enjoyment -- I am sure it was awesome being out there surrounded by the sky but the chill factor must be a beast!    Alaskans!

In the next couple of days I'll put a book study post up but it might be shorter than usual.

New Year Pictures

2012-01-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

A Happy New Year!

Since I have not been posting here much and can't think of much to say I thought I would post some family pictures. We have an unhappy tradition of family-picture-taking. You can see that Clare is almost never the problem. It's her brothers. One is always sure to be frowning, or closing his eyes, or turning away, or trying to disappear off the edge of the picture or behind someone else's head..

Plus, I find California light challenging.   I will say no more.

We went to our lake to get these pictures. It has been historically drained to be cleaned out and have something else environmentally friendly done to it.    You can see it in the background of some of the pictures.

I don't know when all our family will be together again. In a few days we all scatter to different parts of the Pacific coast.    To think, only 9 years ago Paddy was a newborn and my oldest was only 16! No wonder I often feel dizzy!

Good form, picture too backlit

A little overexposed now, Kieron is obscured and Paddy looks spacy.

Sean and Liam take a talk break

Nice background, but family all shadowy

Cute, but Sean is completely blocked

Clare and Paddy take some time off

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T21:17:00.000-08:00

A rare picture of all our family together for the first time in a year! Our clothes are even somewhat color-coordinated. I suppose it is too much to ask that we all have open eyes at the same time.

Wishing you all a very blessed Christmastide!

Questions, Wonder, Faith

2011-12-23T16:09:00.000-08:00

Going for a walk this afternoon -- we have had a warm winter so far and the outdoors isn't covered with snow as it usually is -- I was thinking more about that quote about wonder and how it is the beginning of the road to wisdom.

I was thinking about how I can read a book or article, understand what I'm reading yet after I put it down remember almost nothing about it UNLESS (and this is what struck me) it was somewhat mysterious.   And there are all sorts of ways to be mysterious and therefore memorable.   My favorite poetry is somewhat obscure; and I often remember an essay better if I disagreed with it than when I completely agreed; and the stories I remember best are the ones that seem to open up a new vista or leave something unresolved.

It can't be a mystery of incompetence -- I don't like pretentiously obscure poetry, or blockheaded essays, or stories that have lots of loose ends because the writer dropped literary stitches as he wrote.   It has to be a puzzle or like a curtain that somehow shifted where I got a glimpse of something beautiful and strange, but the curtain fell back before I could see it completely.

Realizing this, I wonder if it could help me remember better what I read. Study Skills courses tell me to pose myself questions as I read in order to remember, and this paralyzes me with disgusted boredom from the start.   It's sort of like looking at a Cosmo cover in the grocery line which promises to tell me how to attract my significant other.   I feel like something slimy has tried to drop on me.

But in another way, it seems true that this wondering instinct leads me to muse and ponder, and those are the only ways to find out.   It is said more than once of Mary that she "pondered in her heart" and this is a very sign of how she recognized and acknowledged mystery without turning away from it as if it were merely a closed box marked "mystery here"

It seems like nowadays we either deny there is mystery, or think of it as a sort of shallow puzzle or distraction, or imbue it with a deceptive gnostic cloak, turn away with fear and distrust in favor of something more easily grasped by our senses.

We also teach badly by ignoring real questions in favor of ones that are too easily answerable. Children start wondering as soon as their survival needs are met.     But it's easy to imply to them that learning is just stocking the head with information, and then they stop wondering.

Cardinal Newman says that learning is ultimately directed towards wisdom or enlargement of mind, which is a very different thing from mere quantity of information.

Or, again, the censure often passed on what is called undigested reading, shows us that knowledge without system is not Philosophy. Students who store themselves so amply with literature or science, that no room is left for determining the respective relations which exist between their acquisitions, one by one, are rather said to load their minds than to enlarge them.

Some other things that are different from true enlargement of mind, though they may masquerade as such:

love of system, theorizing, fancifulness, dogmatism, and bigotry

Aristotle (in the Metaphysics) says similiarly that wisdom is not just a mass of particulars

"Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the 'why' of anything-e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.

So Wisdom is the knowledge of "what kind are the causes and the principles".

It is in wondering, according to Aristotle, that we start on the journey to wisdom, not by doing or making things per se:

"That it (wisdom) is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.

And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. And this is confirmed by the facts; for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured, that such knowledge began to be sought. Evidently then we do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage; but as the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake.

Newman talks about Wisdom somewhat differently, as beginning in Faith, but still "right judgment" is not all that different from knowledge of first principles and causes, except that (as Newman says later in his sermon) Faith can bypass and surpass the painful intellectual rigor needed to even approach by human means a partial understanding of these causes and principles.

The Collect virtually speaks of Faith, when it makes mention of Almighty God's "teaching the hearts of His faithful people by the sending to them the light of His Holy Spirit;" and of the Wisdom of the perfect, when it prays God, that "by the same Spirit" we may "have a right judgment in all things."

In this context the movement of the Holy Spirit begins with Faith and is perfected in wisdom, or right judgement.

knowledge itself, though a condition of the mind's enlargement, yet, whatever be its range, is not that very thing which enlarges it. Rather the foregoing instances show that this enlargement consists in the comparison of the subjects of knowledge one with another. We feel ourselves to be ranging freely, when we not only learn something, but when we also refer it to what we knew before. It is not the mere addition to our knowledge which is the enlargement, but the change of place, the movement onwards, of that moral centre, to which what we know and what we have been acquiring, the whole mass of our knowledge, as it were, gravitates. And therefore a philosophical cast of thought, or a comprehensive mind, or wisdom in conduct or policy, implies a connected view of the old with the new; an insight into the bearing and influence of each part upon every other; without which there is no whole, and could be no centre. It is the knowledge, not only of things, but of their mutual relations. It is organized, and therefore living knowledge.

Later on in the sermon, he describes how Faith (speaking generally) can reach the highest that Wisdom is capable of (naturally speaking):

Whatever be the subject-matter and the point in question, sacred or profane, Faith has a true view of it, and Wisdom can have no more; nor does it become truer because it is held in connexion with other opinions, or less true because it is not. And thus, since Faith is the characteristic of all Christians, a peasant may take the same view of human affairs in detail as a philosopher; and we are often perplexed whether to say that such persons are intellectually gifted or not. They have clear and distinct opinions; they know what they are saying; they have something to say about any subject; they do not confuse points of primary with those of secondary importance; {305} they never contradict themselves: on the other hand they are not aware that there is any thing extraordinary about their judgments; they do not connect any two judgments together; they do not recognize any common principles running through them; they forget the opinions they have expressed, together with the occasion; they cannot defend themselves; they are easily perplexed and silenced; and, if they set themselves to reason, they use arguments which appear to be faulty, as being but types and shadows of those which they really feel, and attempts to analyze that vast system of thought which is their life, but not their instrument.

He distinguishes it here from Bigotry, which is like Faith often partially uneducated, but doesn't possess the habit of right judgment -- it misjudges, and over-extends partial truths, and puts things out of order. Of course, in most actual people you find a mixture of traits -- there is hardly anyone free of bigotry, either rationalistic or fideistic, but you do find exemplars of Faith in the saints, whether they happened to be well educated, or not.

In this way, true Faith is perfected in Wisdom, not by human means but by grace. I am supposing that false or warped faith always resolves into some kind of bigotry. And I'm not just talking about professedly religious faith here, either, because, as Newman says, we can't do without some sort of dogmatism or principle, whether we happen to acknowledge it or not:

Thus, what is invidiously called dogmatism and system, in one shape or other, in one degree or another, is, I may say, necessary to the human mind; we cannot reason, feel, or act, without it; it forms the stamina of thought, which, when it is removed, languishes, and droops. Sooner than dispense with principles, the mind will take them at the hand of others, will put up with such as are faulty or uncertain;—and thus much Wisdom, Bigotry, and Faith, have in common. Principle is the life of them all; but Wisdom is the application of adequate principles to the state of things as we find them, Bigotry is the application of inadequate or narrow principles, while Faith is the maintenance of principles, without caring to apply or adjust them..

and also

Even sceptics cannot proceed without elementary principles, though they would fain dispense with every yoke and bond.

Speaking of Reading Books

2011-12-23T00:30:00.000-08:00

.....and about thoughts on 2011 and plans for 2012, I thought of another couple of things I wanted to change this year.

One was that I didn't really read very many devotional books when I look back on last year. I read lots of books with a Christian perspective, and particularly I am glad I read so many Christian novels, but I didn't finish many classic books on Christian living.    Next year I'd like to read more of these, particularly rereads.

Another related thing -- I had no way to record reading that wasn't book or was only excerpted from books.   So when I, say, browsed through a book on my shelves and read for about an hour, but didn't read from cover to cover, I just didn't write it down, even if it was good quality reading.

I stayed away from some reading I would have liked to do because I wasn't sure if I could commit to reading the whole thing cover to cover.   This sort of ties in with the lack of religious books recorded because sometimes I did start reading an excellent religious book -- I started reading CS Lewis's Christian Reflections, I reread some of ST Francis de Sales' God's Will For You, I read quite a lot of a biography on St Francis de Sales, I reread a good bit of Imitation of Christ, and I read parts of a compilation of St Thomas Aquinas.   But I didn't really know how to count this. Should I count pages next year?   That sounds too difficult and quantity-oriented for something like reading. What about when I read an article online?   Do any of you keep track of this kind of reading and if so, how?

Hollow Men

2011-12-22T00:23:00.000-08:00

This is from The Hollow Universe, by Charles de Koninck, and reminds me a bit of CS Lewis's Abolition of Man which we were discussing this fall:

The prevailing 'scientific outlook', above all in the Commonwealth, is now more than ever dominated by Hume. His critique does not affect science as a tool; indeed, mathematics is now largely recognized for what he thought it was—a tool, and a quite reliable one. But his treatment of induction and causality is now being used to snuff out that first type of wonder : wonder about what a cause is, what is cause of what, what movement is, what place and time are, and so on. His apparently cold analysis has met with considerable popular success; and its effect is to drive from the human mind that primordial curiosity, the parent of all other motives of inquiry, which Aristotle describes in his account of the beginnings of science and wisdom.

Surely it is disheartening to reflect that we live in an age when it can be necessary, not merely to explain Einstein's speculative goal, but even to defend it against another type of mind which would have it that his time might have been better spent in the practice of plumbing. But the spirit of intellectual nihilism is gaining ground. It is frightening to think of the extent to which people are now being encouraged to banish from the minds of their children great questions as devoid of all meaning; to dispel the wonder which is a young mind's birthright; to confine their spirit to petty problems that can be answered once and for all to the satisfaction of reasoners incapable of raising a question to begin with. We now have a philosophy to show that there are no problems but those which it has shown to be no problem; and to decree that there is no philosophy other than one that is a denial of philosophy. Under the twinkle of a fading star, Hollow Men rejoice at a hollow world of their own making.

De Koninck was a Belgian Thomistic scholar who taught on the topic of "the compatibility and complementarity of philosophical knowledgeand scientific inquiry". Apparently the late Dr Ralph McInerny studied under him. There are several writings of De Koninck's linked online at Good Catholic Books.

Interesting factoid, if Wikipedia is to be believed:

De Koninck and his family hosted and entertained many notables in their Quebec City residence, among them Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his fiery writer-artist wife, Consuelo Suncín, during their five week stay in the province in the spring of 1942. The De Koninck's precocious eight year old son, Thomas, whom Saint-Exupéry met, may have served as an inspiration for the extraterrestrial visitor of his most famous novella, The Little Prince.

Keeping House Book Study: Chapter Five

2011-12-20T10:52:00.000-08:00

(vintage kitchen by janet hill)

This is chapter 5 of the Keeping House Book Study, on Clothing a Household. Like me, you probably are busy with your own household and not really focusing on book studies. I almost decided to skip this week. But I'm going to go ahead and get this out. There will be no book study for next week due to Christmas. I will pick up January 2nd unless it is just too crazy, in which case the next post will be January 9.

In this chapter, Margaret Peterson compares the past with the present in this chapter on what it takes to clothe a household. I'm going to follow that pattern and then comment on what I personally do in each category. Please share any ideas or clothing hacks or insights you want to talk about, as well as the parts of the chapter that struck you most. Or just say Hi. My standards are so very low for topicality during this holiday season.

Providing Clothing

In the old days, this meant taking up your needle and thread, or knitting needles perhaps, and building a wardrobe for your household. Some households perhaps even spun and wove cloth starting from the original wool.    If the mistress of the household and her daughters didn't do this, perhaps their servants did. Even when richer households went to a tailor or dressmaker, they didn't buy readymade clothing. It was custom-made for them.

Nowadays, generally woman buy rather than make clothing. If they do sew or knit or crochet, they generally do it in a more creative than utilitarian spirit.    Clothing is inexpensive, ready-made, and ubiquitous in stores. That means there are stores devoted completely to clothing and more where you can buy clothing along with other things.

My household == I have gradually become more conscious that most discount clothing is outsourced to countries where cheap labor is plentiful. Sometimes I feel like we are like the early days of the Industrial Revolution where women and children slaved for starvation wages.    Plus, I don't much like cheap clothes and don't like spending the money on more expensive stuff. Consequently, I almost always shop at thrift stores.... except for socks and underwear.

Our Drawers and Closets

In the old days, poor people might only have 2 or 3 outfits. They made their clothes last through several incarnations..... they repaired, retrimmed or reworked their worn clothes, perhaps trimming them down for their children, or eventually tearing them up for rags. I believe rich people often had far, far more even than we do nowadays, and it was often impractical clothing, fine flimsy silks that couldn't be passed on to the needy after wearing.

Nowadays, clothing is so abundant that we can easily end up with more than we ever wear. Lots of people want to wear what's in style which means buying all new clothing (often marked up in price) and the right store name or brand name.

In my household -- Homeschooling seems to help somewhat with this, and so does being somewhat nerdy, because one tends not to care so much what one wears, as long as it's comfortable and decent. I am not sure what people do if they or their kids really care about labels and that kind of thing. I suppose I would have the kids spend their own money for status upgrades. My daughter finds nice things in thrift stores and my sons generally develop some type of clothing convention -- my oldest son wears khakis and collared shirts and my other boys wear either casual/athletic or sometimes nicer pants and collared shirts or sweaters.

Laundry

In the old days, laundry was backbreaking and labor intensive. There was a reason why we "washed on Mondays" -- because we were well rested after the Sunday Sabbath. Again, poorer folk did their own laundry or took in others' laundry; rich folk had it done by others.

Nowadays, everyone has a washer and dryer. This hasn't made laundry exactly more manageable, but it is definitely easier to do. And we do way more of it. We wash our clothes after one or two wearings.

In my household, I sort of resist this imperative of continuous laundering, but it is difficult because boys really are hard on their clothes and adults and older teens usually don't want to put on already-worn clothes because hyper-cleanliness is sort of engrained in our culture.

Mending

In the old days, poor people valued every precious scrap of fabric, as I mentioned above, so they would repurpose again and again until the last rag was worn threadbare.

Nowadays, our clothing is so consumable. We often aren't very aware of where it came from or where it goes after we tire of it and toss it in the trash or give it away.

In my household, I've tried to re-purpose torn clothes, but polyester doesn't work well for rags (just saying) and you never see kids wearing patched or repaired clothing any more. Socks wear fast and they don't darn easily.    The fabric usually isn't the kind you can really use for quilts and the like.

I've done different things through the years to deal with this -- I sometimes use old socks as dusters, for example. And because we live in the mountains, and I have boys, I keep worn clothes for play clothes even after they are unacceptable for public wear.    I also convert trousers with holes in the knees into shorts.   And I keep the better casual clothes only for going out into company.

My own clothes are easier.. As long as I keep them in decent shape I can usually pass them back to the thrift store. I usually buy simple tops and jeans and skirts that don't really follow the fashion so that they aren't obsolete by the time I hand them back in.    My problem is buying too much. I really like sorting through thrift stores and finding new things. I've gotten better about letting go of things I find I am not wearing.

These last two parts are more about the natural rhythm of seasons, ages, and dealing with the daily flow of clothing, which probably hasn't changed quite so much as other things from past to present, because it's sort of inevitable that we will deal with these rhythms to some extent.

Seasons and Ages

We all have our strategies for dealing with seasons and age changes. I rotate clothes in and out by seasons. When we were having babies, we kept outgrown clothes for the next child. Nowadays only two of my kids are still growing and they are quite close to the same size so I don't really have put-away clothes since the outgrown ones go right from Aidan to Paddy.

It's easy to keep way too many clothes between kids, though. I used to keep almost everything, but finally realized that I only needed to keep a basic wardrobe in storage for the next kid. The most important thing to keep is dressy clothes since they are more expensive to replace. I have a couple of boxes devoted to boys' dress clothes, all white shirts and navy pants, for almost every size. But now of course I can discard the ones that Paddy has outgrown since he is the youngest.

Putting Things Away

Mrs Peterson talks about the rhythm of sorting laundry before cleaning, folding or ironing laundry as it comes out, bringing out clothes by season or age, and putting things away after use or cleaning.    I have to admit that where I dislike most household maintenance jobs, I do really relish the rhythm of laundry and seasonal taking out and bringing in of clothes.

I used to get overwhelmed with it but I weeded out a lot of extras and what was left was way more manageable. I think I like laundry because it feels and smells good, whereas most household maintenance involves slimy, disgusting, or harsh smelling things.   I love hanging up laundry to dry and bringing it in to fold it, but I only do this during the warmer months.   Once our dryer was broken for two years because we couldn't afford to replace or repair it, and I hardly missed it.   I hung the clothes up in the loft above the wood stove and they came down warm and dry and smelling so clean.

I am not very good at folding and don't spend a long time on mathematical precision, but I enjoy it. I often get lost in thought while I'm doing it. I wish everything in our Keeping House litany was as simple and gratifying for me.    I suppose it's true of any litany or oft-repeated prayer, that there will be some phrases that are particularly satisfying to say either because they just sound good or because they have some personal significance.

Please share any random thoughts that occur to you. Do you have any useful or creative strategies for dealing with our consumable, trendy, too abundant clothing modern challenges with clothing?

The Year of Books

2011-12-19T17:16:00.000-08:00

2011 was definitely a Year of Book Reading for me.   Right now I am up at 175 books.

So I definitely met the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge.

Because of the challenge, this is the first year I actually kept track of everything I read --- with the help of Goodreads.

A few thoughts about that:

It was nice to really focus seriously on reading for a year.   In past years I probably simply couldn't have found the time. Plus, in past years, I tried very hard to restrain my tendency to read voraciously.   I think even something good like reading can be disordered if it becomes too big a part of your life.

On the other hand, I know that many people I really admire are great readers -- they have read widely and deeply. There is no way around it: that simply takes some time. I couldn't do it when I had a special needs preschooler, a baby and five homeschool students of all ages.   But I have more time right now. It may not last forever, but while it does, why not catch up on reading?

I am especially proud of reading the books I had always wanted to read, like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Consolations of Philosophy, Augustine's Confessions, and others of that sort, that are on Great Books lists everywhere.   Now at least I can say I've read them, and even learned from them.

All in all, I think it worked out well to use 2011 as a sort of Book Sabbatical. But I don't think I need to do that every year.

Here are some thoughts on my Reading Challenge for 2012.

Not Quite So Many Books. Next year I probably won't push myself to read the equivalent of a book almost every other day, which is what 175 to 365 roughly comes out to.

Books On My Shelves. I think I instead will try to focus more on reading or rereading the books on my shelves. I know I have said that before. But I really do want to.   If books are on my shelf, presumably it is for a reason --- so that they can be read. If that is not happening, why are they there?

Juvenile Books: Most of the books on the kids' shelves, I have already read, but I probably will try to read the rest.   I found that when I was reading so much last year, I sometimes needed to read a lighter book after I had plodded through a more difficult one.   So in those cases I can read a juvenile book.    Now that my teenager and myself both have Kindles, I can read public domain juvenile books along with the ones for older folk.

Rereading Books I think I will try to do a reread for every few new books I read. In about a year I turn 50. I think this age is a good time to read back through some of the most influential books in my life.

Books that Changed the World.    My husband subscribed to Easton Press's Books that Changed the World.    So we have a shelf full of these handsome leather bound books that really want someone to read them.   I am not vowing to read them all, but I'm going to try to make a dent in them.

Keep Track Of Books Read. My father always kept track of the books he read and encouraged us to do the same. I always tried, but rarely kept a consistent log. This is the first year I really did record everything I read. I would like to keep doing it.

So there are my thoughts and plans.   Have you thought yet about what you are going to do about your reading in 2012?

Keeping House Book Study: Chapter Four

2011-12-13T01:00:00.000-08:00

(vintage kitchen by janet hill)

We now move to Chapter Four of Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life. This chapter is one of a pair. Chapter 4 is about Clothes to Wear and Chapter 5 is called Clothing a Household.   In fact, the middle part of the book is structured so that the chapters come in pairs, with the first in the pair being a sort of meditation on context and Scriptural background, and the second being more about application.   I am only noticing this now, on my second read-through, and me an English Litearture major! I guess that's why it's good to study a book rather than just read through it.

Points emphasized in this chapter.

Clothing and Scripture

While animals and plants are already clothed in their beautiful and suitable garments, humans are naked without clothing.   I once read an article by Mark Shea on Clothing the Naked that "nake" is an obsolete verb meaning "to strip." In other words, to humans after the Fall, nakedness is a humiliating privation, not a natural state.   Obviously, we unclothe ourselves for certain situations like taking a bath, but then we are sort of "clothed" with privacy and seclusion, as if our surroundings were our garments.

Clothes have symbolism that invest function and decorum with meaning. Adam and Eve clothe themselves with fig leaves, surely an inadequate covering, out of shame at their sin. God gives them animal skins to wear, in a way restoring them some dignity as continued stewards of Creation even though brokenly so, and also showing them His intention to continue to provide for them even in changed circumstances.

We all remember how Israel's favoritism towards Joseph was expressed in terms of a fine and rich garment.    The garment becomes a symbol of injustice for his brothers, and later, a symbol of violence when it is stained with blood and shown to his grieving father. Clothing can symbolize grief, as when Israel rent his garments when he thought his son was dead.   Clothing can also symbolize one's role in life -- the prophets wore distinctive garments that set them apart from others.

Prophecies are sometimes rendered in terms of clothing:

“Awake, awake, put on your strength, O Zion, put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city” (Isaiah 52:1).

The Proverbs 31 woman is shown in terms of clothing as provision and care:

She shall not fear for her house in the cold of snow: for all her domestics are clothed with double garments. She hath made for herself clothing of tapestry: fine linen, and purple is her covering.

The meditation also includes clothing in terms of providing for others, including the poor and needy, and keeping busy with the spindle. In this way, we see how our humble earthly missions can be reflections of how God provides for us.

The basic point seems to be that clothes are an extension of oneself and one's relation to the world. In some ways, they are deeply connected with one's body and one's inner self and one's outer self -- how one interacts with the outer world.

New Testament and the Plan of Salvation

Later, in the New Testament, garments are often thought of sacramentally, as outward signs of spiritual things. When the woman with the humiliating bleeding issue touches Jesus's garment, she is healed, and He feels the power leave Him and is thus aware of what she did.   When Jesus is transfigured, His clothes are white and too bright to look at.   His Shroud is cast aside when He is resurrected, and the women find it lying in His tomb, discarded.

Of course, we are all aware that one of the Corporal Acts of Mercy is to clothe the naked. More than practicality is involved here -- we are acting in proxy for our Lord, restoring dignity and giving loving concern to those who have been divested of those things.

Then there is the mysterious parable of the bridal guest, who is thrown into the outer darkness when he comes to the wedding feast wearing his old tattered clothes rather than the wedding garments provided for him. Here, we notice that appropriate clothes are a mark of respect for others, not just showing our own dignity but also showing what we think of those around us.

I don't want to get out of my theological depth, but I notice that in these New Testament examples, garments become more than symbols or signs. They are actually deeply associated with God's grace itself, and our participation in His Life through that grace.    Another example of this might be St Paul's use of the idea of the "armor of God" in Ephesians 6, where the armor referred to is righteousness, faith, truth, peace, salvation, and the Word.     These are directly spiritual gifts, realities of God's provisions for our souls.

Now on to how we clothe ourselves and how it matters -- these are sort of scattered, because I couldn't find the "pattern" in Mrs Peterson's order of considerations, but you could say that basically she considers clothes in terms of: Personal Identity, Social or Group Identity, Geographical/Seasonal Context, and Tradition.   At least, that is how I would sum up the different categories.

Clothing as extension of self.    Clothing can be like housing in that we show our personal character traits by what we have in our closet.   Many of us have a lot of clothes we don't wear. Some wear wrinkled, unflattering clothes, while others take very great care with their appearance. I usually wear jeans and simple loose tops reflecting that I don't want to be bothered and that soft clothes don't irritate me like newer or crisper ones.

You can tell a lot about someone by what they choose to wear. My daughter has been fascinated by the topic of modesty and how it relates to the inner self, ever since her teenage years, and has written about it extensively on her blog.

Clothing and Personal Identity. We dress according to who we are or sometimes who we would like to be.   Sometimes our jobs or roles have a particular style of dress -- a judge wears a robe, a priest wears a collar. Sometimes our choices are aspirational: we aspire to be something we're not yet -- say, a movie star or a rich person -- and our choices are a reflection of that.

Clothing and group identity. Because our society emphasizes individuality, sometimes we resist things like dress codes that try to focus on group rather than personal identity.    In California at least, people tend to dress casually for things that were formerly formal -- like churchgoing and restaurants.

Clothing and family. When we are mothers or wives, our family's clothes may add up to an extension of ourselves too. Mrs Peterson describes the tensions that can ensue when a preschooler or teen wants to wear things that we don't think are suitable.    Personally, I give my kids a lot of range except where their clothing choices seem to reflect disrespect either to the situation/company or to their own bodies. My children tend naturally to err on the side of privacy and modesty -- I think largely because they are introverts with introverted parents.

Clothing and climate. We dress according to where we live. The Swedes reportedly say that there is no bad weather, only bad dress for the weather.

Clothing and season -- young children generally have to be instructed in what kind of clothes are appropriate for what season.   I come from Alaska where we get out the summer clothes when the temperature is above 50 so sometimes my family shocks Californians when the kids are jacket-less in what seems like winter weather to valley-dwellers.

Clothing and context. The author makes the point that people who seem dressed completely cluelessly reveal a lack of connection to the outside world. This seems just to me.   Aquinas talks about modesty not just as wearing clothes that aren't scanty, but as appropriateness to what is around the person.    So a person who showed up at a ball in severe black clothing would be somewhat immodest, unless there was a modest reason for doing so (I suppose if one was a religious or a prophet or in deep mourning).

So in that way, clothing has a kind of justice to it -- it respects both what one owes to oneself and one's dependents, and also what one owes to the occasion and to the other people.

Clothing and Integrity. The author makes a point that clothes should probably have some truthfulness in them. For example, the modern trend towards "distressing" new clothes seems in some ways to make a false statement. Another example is when older people try to dress as if they were much younger.

Clothing and ceremony. She also makes the point that "ceremonious" clothing shows a link to tradition (or a disrespect of it). For example, people involved in a wedding or funeral or graduation traditionally wear certain types of clothing.   When people violate the traditions, it probably does indicate either cluelessness, or a lack of concern for tradition.

On the other hand, I think it's probably possible to be over the top and excessive in concern for tradition and convention, to the point where we might become excessively fixated on having just the right appearance, and judge uncharitably those who don't meet our standards.   This type of thing isn't very common in central California where I live, but I'm sure it exists, especially since I seem to have a fictional spinster great aunt in my head who makes horrible silent criticisms whenever I dress my family for some "occasion". My own spinster great aunts were very jolly and never criticized others' clothing, so I don't know where this voice comes from!

Clothing and the DIY tradition. Many of us, she mentions, find it much less expensive to buy clothes than make them, while the reverse was true in past times.   More of this next week, but one solution I've found is to buy from thrift stores and repurpose.     No need to give away the sewing machine and knitting needles quite yet, especially if you enjoy the creative aspect of clothing your household.

The next chapter goes into more detail about how we clothe our households -- details such as shopping, laundry, and so on.    In the meantime, it might be valuable to ponder how our closets and laundry piles look.

Some thought questions:

Do we have too much that is unused?
Do we have enough of the right types of clothes? (such as good outfits for special occasions, worn clothes for play or work).
How do we care for our clothes considering that they may be passed on to others after we have outgrown them or realized they are unnecessary?
Do your kids, like mine, actually ask for socks and underwear for gifts since their mom doesn't always keep up with the level of entropy for these things?
How does clothing relate to provision and care, both in material and spiritual matters?

There may be more things to consider. These are areas that have been stumbling areas for me in the past. I used to have all kinds of trouble reserving a "best outfit" for my kids; I often acquire too many clothes (just because you can get them cheap at yard sales, thrift stores and as handmedowns from generous friends and relatives, doesn't mean it's OK to have too much).

I also have traditionally had trouble respecting clothes and keeping them in good condition so I can pass them on (especially boys' clothes -- and definitely, that can be challenging territory, especially when clothes in the US aren't always made to last through more than one child!).

Only recently have I become aware that clothing is a sign -- that choosing good clothes for special occasions (for example) is not just a tiresome social duty, but a sort of testimony as to the importance of that occasion.

the family Quest meets with misadventure

2011-12-12T07:14:00.000-08:00

We have been up in Oregon all week, which is the reason I haven't been blogging much at all. For some reason, I never seem to be able to sit and write while we are there. I think it might be because there are lots of little errands to run, and moments to spend with the older boys catching up on their lives, and also because it's a small apartment -- 2 bedrooms and 8 people. We do all right but it is close quarters.

While we were up there our (Nissan) Quest ran into some difficulties. We were involved in a low-speed crash. No one was much hurt, thankfully, but the Quest looks over:

Probably fixable, but since there are almost 150,000 miles on it and it's a 98 vehicle, perhaps not worth it? We haven't decided yet.

Our family Quest, to try to all get to heaven eventually, still remains in effect, but possibly, some other vehicle will have to convey us towards that destination. We drove back to California in a rental Mazda.

I haven't ever been in a car accident with that much force in it, and I just thought it was interesting that though I didn't feel that much anxiety consciously, I trembled whenever I talked about the thing for the next couple of days. Plus, the two friends I was texting in the hours after the accident both said I wasn't making much sense.

I had a very stiff neck and back for a couple of days; because of the way the impact slewed us sideways, and I also slept way more than usual. Every afternoon I would get sleepy and freezing cold and go off and nap for most of the afternoon -- it was like getting a flu, except that I wasn't getting a flu.

The third day I woke up feeling pretty much OK, though both Kevin and I are a bit more jumpy as drivers and front seat passenger these days.

The young man riding with us at the time, an old friend of the family who was up with us to visit Sean and the other older boys, was at the ground zero of the impact, but fortunately the inside pushed in way less than the outside. He was sore for a few days, but hopefully is mostly recovered now.

Aidan, in the back rear, didn't appear affected at all. He seemed to think it was rather exciting, since he spends his life looking for ambulances and fire trucks, and there were a multitude around us. Later he talked about how the windows "exploded" which from his perspective they did, but fortunately outwards, not into the car. All in all, his experience of the crash was not at all stressful.

Prayers that everyone involved recovers fully would be appreciated, thank you!

Because we only got back home late last night from Oregon, and today will be a catch up day, I probably won't get to the next section of Keeping House until tomorrow. Today I hope to read others' posts linked in my Mr Linky Widget.

Keeping House Book Study: Chapter Three

2011-12-05T00:30:00.000-08:00

(vintage kitchen by janet hill)

We are on Chapter Three of Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life.

I like the way Margaret Peterson takes a theme and carries it through with a series of reflections on different aspects. Here in chapter 3, she discusses "Sheltering a Household."    I almost wish I had scheduled two weeks to discuss this chapter because there is so much to think about.

I put some thought questions after every item. They are not obligatory, obviously; I just want to be able to come back to this part of the book and think about the questions it raises for me.   I think it's good to really think through our household arrangements, say, once or twice a year or perhaps every couple of years, and so this chapter seems helpful to me in getting at what keeping house is really about.

1. Idea of the Dream House.

Part of the American dream seems to be the idea of a "dream house", a spacious, elegant, low-maintenance place where we can enjoy all the comforts of life. Mrs Peterson suggests that this dream may distract us from the reality of many who have no home at all. It also may keep us from putting heart into the less-than-ideal home we actually have.

I can see another side, though, where a dream might work like a vision and help keep our imaginations interacting with the homes we actually have. Sometimes after I have thought about my dream, my creativity wakes up and I actually make some good changes that affect my real home for the better.

Do you have a "dream house" in your imagination? Does the dream help you live better, or does it make you discontent and withdrawn from your actual house?

2.   The Structure of Our Home

How our home is constructed does matter. For example, she says, many new houses are built with an open kitchen/great room area dominated by a blank wall where a huge entertainment center is meant to be set.   With this arrangement, it seems all too easy to have our family life dominated by TV and the media.

The neighborhood also matters.   Everyone has seen gated communities filled with big enclosed houses where it is obvious there is no real community -- that people spend very little time at home and when they are at home, want to keep to themselves.

These types of things might be considerations when we are looking for a house. If we already have one, we still have a lot of control over how we live in it. We don't HAVE to put a huge TV in front of that blank wall -- we could hang family pictures or have a huge bookshelf or board-game center.

What is the structure of your house meant to encourage? Does it fit your family's values? Is there any way to make it fit more closely?

3. The Size of Our Home

Everyone thinks their home is too small.   Except me.   But I have a big house and with only five people left, it feels like living in an empty lodge.    Everyone thinks they have too little storage space.   Members of our society tend to accumulate too much stuff and hesitate to let any of it go. I've gotten MUCH better about this through the past 10 years.

"The premise of our culture is that limits are not compatible with either creativity or contentment. Christian tradition, on the other hand, has been inclined to see limits as a necessary component of human flourishing."

This seems like a good point. I'm never so unhappy as when I have too much freedom -- or perhaps, to put it another way -- too few boundaries and parameters. An opening up of possibilities at first is a rush, and then a burden.

How do the boundaries and limits of your life help foster contentment and creativity? Have you ever found satisfaction in making do with what you have, or repurposing in a creative way?

4. Beauty in the Home

It's not necessary to have a house decorator or access to glamorous stores and catalogs in order to nurture beauty in your home. And Margaret Peterson does think cultivating beauty is an important part of keeping house.   She recommends paint as a frugal, simple way of making the house more lovely.   My daughter is very good at adding little decorative touches to a corner or room -- a flower, a bit of lace, a carefully placed ornament.    I tend to like the beauty of clean lines .

What is your idea of beauty in a home? Does it fit your own style; is it left over from your childhood or shaped by glamorous magazines?

5. Space and How to Use It

Mrs Peterson says we can think about what we want to happen in our house, what we want our life to be like within its walls, and then arrange our house to make those things more possible and likely.   For example, when my husband and I thought about house design (we had our house built about 15 years ago) we wanted a great central open area with a fireplace right in the middle of things so we could gather easily in the heart of the home. We also wanted a lot of little nooks and crannies so our introverts could always find a little quiet and privacy, so we had window seats and various corners set up for that reason. We wanted our own bedroom large to give enough room for our babies to sleep close to us.

We wanted a family room where we could relax, and where we'd have enough room for homeschool projects and bookshelves and the like, but we didn't want it altogether separate from the rest of the house, so we made a loft/schoolroom.   The children had smaller rooms that they shared (except for my only daughter, who has a tiny room of her very own) because we didn't want their rooms to be like kingdoms with endless space for toys and excess clothes. We wanted it just large enough so they would have a few things for themselves and then most of the toys and books could be in central locations.

How does your house use space? Is there any way you can make the spaces in your household work better for you?

6. A Room of One's Own

Peterson suggests that the homemaker really deserves and needs a space of her own -- if not a room, at least a small corner or craft center or desk -- anyway, a somewhat private and personal space.   In my case, our master bedroom walk in closet is devoted to homeschool supplies and "my" books and things. My husband and I don't have many clothes so we really didn't need a walk-in closet.   I've also sometimes had a desk of my own in the loft, when I needed to keep an eye on the babies and toddlers.   Now I usually sit in my room or in front of the fireplace.

Do you have a personal space (even if it is sometimes shared with toddlers or teens who want to hang out with you?) What do you do in this space? Is there a way to make it more suitable to your own interests and talents?

7. Beware of Too Many Masterpieces

This is correlated with the idea of "too much stuff". It's better to have one special thing (not necessarily an expensive item, just something unique or significant) as a focal point in a room, not a huge jumble. If you do have a bunch of things to showcase, it's probably better to have a "theme" to organize the display -- my mother in law likes collecting, but she collects in "themes" (like figurines of elephants) so there is visual unity in her displays.    She also has a large collection of vintage family photographs on one wall. So her house is full of fascinating things to look at, but they don't strike the eye as a jumble because of the way she places them.

Would taking away some things make what is left more meaningful?    Is there any way you can group your treasures to give them a more unified effect?

8. A Place for Everything

When you start running out of room, discard a few things or don't buy anything new.   People are finite, she says -- there is a limit to what they can manage and enjoy.   Personally, when I stopped thinking of myself as a curator of possessions and started thinking of myself as someone who does better making do with a few things, I gained so much freedom.   I realized it was more trouble for me to organize and keep track of a non-essential thing I used perhaps a couple of times a year, than to just make do without it.    Others may be more gifted in curatorship than I am, and more capable of ordering and maintaining large amounts of "things".

Do you feel overwhelmed by your things? Does it take a lot of time and energy to find things, or to dig them out of their storage to use them, or to put them away? Is there any way to simplify?

9. Cleanliness and Godliness?

Here's a bit of perspective for those of us who feel that if people can't eat off our floors, we are failures in housekeeping!   I think this was HUGE with me in my younger days and I am afraid I neglected the other creative parts of housekeeping because I was pursuing a sort of (vain) vision of an immaculate, perfectly ordered house.   Margaret Peterson says that while it's true that cleanliness (purity) and order are identified with righteousness in Scriptures, they only became basically synonymous in the 19th century.   There was a new awareness of the importance of hygiene in medical treatment, and this carried over almost to an obsession with cleanliness as something that divided the cultured class from the disadvantaged class.

I noticed this when I read a book my father wrote about tuberculosis in Alaska. He quoted many primary sources and it was amazing how often white people would come into Native environments and start scrubbing and disinfecting.   It almost came across as an act of aggression. Not that cleanliness isn't a good thing, but it's not necessarily identical with righteousness and superiority.

Because cleanliness is symbolic to many people, how clean the house should be seems to be at the bottom of many housekeeping disagreements.   The one with the highest standards, for some reason, seems to be the one who stands on the moral high ground. You get lots of cleaning-related power plays, from the housekeeper who feels superior to others because her house is cleaner, to the wife and mother who scolds her family because they don't care as much about order and cleanliness as she does.   I certainly don't have any answers here.   I was going to say I don't care much about cleanliness, but in fact I do -- I don't like filth and germs much.   But I am not particularly attached to the LOOK of cleanliness -- a little bit of dust on the windowsills or crumbs on the floor doesn't really bother me much because it doesn't seem dangerous to me. However, a clean appearance is important to me for appearance's sake -- in that I feel embarrassed if someone comes over to my house and there are crumbs on the floor or a smudgy counter.   I think that is why I have such an ambivalent relationship to housekeeping.   I realize that it's not really a virtue to care for appearances, but at the same time I guess I am intrinsically comfortable with a certain level of messiness so if it weren't for appearances, and a fear of getting too comfortable with disorder, I would be happy with that.

How clean does a house need to be? What areas are most important to maintain (perhaps bathrooms and kitchens? and entryways?) What's the balance between your own time and energy, what allows your family to thrive, and what is appropriate for welcoming others into your home?

10. The Value of Space

Wrapping up here -- Mrs Peterson suggests that space is worth at least as much as stuff.    I mentioned how I had changed my views on this during my married life. I used to collect "just in case". It's easy even for people with low incomes to collect a lot of pretty good but not necessary stuff.   I've walked out of thrift stores with a box of fairly good childrens' picture books for $5 or less.

In order not to burden myself with "just in case" things, for me, meant assigning a positive value to emptiness and trying to ensure that drawers were not stuffed to capacity, bookshelves not double-stacked, parts of the walls left clean and empty.   I admit it was way harder when we lived in a tiny, tiny house, but I still think that having some clear empty spaces and surfaces really soothes and blesses the spirit.   If you do have to stock a house almost to the brim, the second best is to have it beautifully and meticulously arranged, but if all that stuff is actually being used, especially by children who can't arrange cupboards like 3D jigsaw puzzles with every piece nested in proper order, then face it -- you will have a lot of trouble using all that stuff AND keeping it from swamping every available space in your house.

Looking at space as a positive value, are there any things around that just clutter up the space and don't add much?

Assignment:

From now on in this study I am going to try to think of something to actually DO as well as think about.   Now that we are getting into the more concrete part of the book (and getting well into Advent, where I like to try to make some changes and resolutions) it seems like a good time.

So for this week I'm going to try her suggestion of thinking about what I want to see happen in my house, and then working backwards in imagination to what should be there (and what should NOT be there) in order to make those things more likely to happen.    I would like to think through her ideas about beauty, space, structure, cleanliness and so on, and try to see what in our house is not quite working for our family goals, and what could be improved.

I suppose in a way this connects to the litany idea. Surely there is a sort of household "litany" of things I really want to see increase and bear fruit in my home -- things like good eating, prayer, reading, quiet study, teamwork, creative projects, and conversation. There are also things I might not care so much about but that are important to my family. For instance, though I'm not much of a movie-watcher, my husband loves movie-watching, and it has become a family type activity. So then it's a matter of arranging household time and space around things that are important to my family and in general, that promote the common good.

An app for the new translation of the Mass

2011-12-01T16:04:00.001-08:00

Last Sunday, for the beginning of the new Church Year, Catholic churches all over the USA started using the new translation of the Latin Novus Ordo mass. I am sure there are all sorts of bloggy comments all over the internet. I liked MacBeth's take on the "under my roof" part. I also liked Msr Charles Pope's Well, Actually, He's Not Talking to You. Both of these answer the charge that the new language is too complicated for us poor dumb laypeople.

Since my two youngest received their First Holy Communion just last spring, and my 15 year old is an altar server, I thought perhaps the entrance of the new translation might be a good time to go through the Mass bit by bit with them and talk about what the different parts mean. Studying the Mass adds up to a doctrinal, devotional and scriptural catechesis in itself because every part of it has meaning.

At the IPhone app store I found this app called iMassExplained. It is by the Daughters of St Paul, who publish books, videos, music CDs and other media related to the Catholic faith, both for adults and children.

Unlike other apps I have mentioned on this blog, it is not free, but 99 cents didn't seem unreasonable to me.

What you get:   Basically what you might see in the front pages of the paper missal they hand out at church.   The changes are bolded and if you click them there is an explanation of what the change means.   Other rubrics and prayers are in color and if you click them, you get a box containing some sort of explanation or additional information on the prayer or activity.

So for example, in the introductory part of the mass, the explanation of "Stand" tells how you actually start praying before the Mass proper begins.   The holy water you bless yourself with as you enter is a reminder of your baptism which brought you originally into the Church.   You genuflect out of respect to the Real Presence of Our Lord in the tabernacle (ETA: as Beate mentioned in the comments, the proper word is "adoration" or "in worship").

The language is simple, so it's not a rigorous explanation of doctrine, but it is substantial enough to make a good start for discussion with my group of boys ages 8 to 15.   Kieron is an altar server so most of this is already familiar to him but that is helpful in our group format as he can add his own perspective.

There are also some prayers in the app, many of them quotes from Pope John Paul II.

I am planning to go through the whole Mass "in slow motion" this way and hopefully in the process also change my apparently set-in-stone habit of responding "And also with you" rather than the more correct "And with your spirit".

We live up in a "station church" area with no Latin masses available closer than an hour's drive, so from that perspective I am very glad that the new translation is more faithful to the Latin and more substantial than the older one.

About the criticism that using more substantial, dignified language leaves dumb Americans in the dark about what the words MEAN, I find that very often, traditional language and more elevated concepts are often easier for children, especially, to grasp, because they are usually richer and more specific.   Who would not remember "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault" better than, umm, whatever we used to say (I've already sort of forgotten)?   And as MacBeth says, behind "Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof" is the beautiful story of the centurion of whom Jesus marvelled and said,

“Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel. I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven."

He was talking of US with that "many will come from east and west"! and what a privilege it is to make that same amazing profession of faith along with that Gentile centurion!

Intellectualizing about Intellectualizing

2011-11-30T16:13:00.001-08:00

A loved one recently told me I was "intellectualizing" and my first reaction was to sort of know what she meant and feel both defensive (no I'm not, how can you say that!) and embarrassed (I probably AM). And of course, a bit hurt and off balance, as well.

My second reaction was "but what does that actually MEAN?" which probably sort of demonstrates the point.   Then after mulling it over for a few days, I went hunting for information on the term on the internet.... thus clinching the case. I do intellectualize.   Still, it can be useful at times. I did learn something. And I gained something out of what she said, which I might not have if I had just reacted simply with something like "How could you say that???"

So here's what I gathered:

Intellectualization is a "flight into reason".   It's often associated with the use of jargon.   It differs from rationalization which strives to justify irrational activity. Someone intellectualizes in order to consider an event or reaction without feeling the anxiety involved in the full experience.   It's a way of detaching or distancing.

Some think it is associated with emotional impoverishment or unpredictability in childhood -- intellectual activity becomes a way to self-soothe, to regulate distress.   I suppose that aside from that, if the family style is somewhat intellectual and a child perceives it, he or she may adopt that style of relating starting at a very early age. In my case, I have always been very emotional, and often found emotional things very difficult to manage directly.   As a child, I didn't like the results when I did let my emotions loose. Thinking gave me a certain amount of clarity while feelings alone were just disturbing, as often as not.   It might be as simple as that.

Apparently the problem with intellectualizing is when it's used not just to modify anxiety or to gain perspective but in order to escape altogether from dis, or to repress emotion.

While searching, I found another site that gives a list of coping mechanisms. Wow, there's quite a list there. There is a section on positive coping.   Because I wanted to know the difference between defensive mechanism and positive strategies, I read that carefully.

The way you cope positively is: solve the problem, address the underlying root problem, look for the benefits in the bad things (silver lining, making lemonade, etc), and use the problem as a way to grow spiritually.   The basic idea with these positive mechanisms is that adversity becomes an opportunity rather than something that weakens you permanently. So you find solutions, genuinely adapt or grow in response to the bad situation.

Following up on this idea and looking for ways to turn bad things to good, I found a PDF article on positive coping.    I haven't read all of it, but I thought there were some interesting distinctions here:

Researchers have come up with two basic distinctions, such as (a) instrumental, attentive, vigilant, or confrontative coping on the one hand, as opposed to (b) avoidant, palliative, and emotional coping on the other . A well-known approach has been put forward by Lazarus (1991), who separates problem-focused from emotion-focused coping. Another conceptual distinction is between assimilative and accommodative coping, whereby the former aims at modifying the environment and the latter at modifying oneself (Brandtstädter, 1992). Assimilative coping implies tenacious goal pursuit, and accommodative coping flexible goal adjustment.

I have only the vaguest idea of what might be meant here, but they seem to indicate different styles or approaches to coping.     The article goes on to talk more in detail about that idea of constructive problem-solving. It seems to depend quite a bit on the confidence that one CAN modify one's circumstances (or at least, adapt to them).

This still left me a little puzzled in regards to HOW intellectualization is maladaptive. Couldn't you say that it gives you more ways to problem-solve and grow? For example, by this research, am I not finding various strategies and insights that could be helpful?

I suppose a key phrase there is "could be".   For example, I am often aware that I am spinning my wheels when I go beyond what I could act on and into "information-gathering" mode. I did that excessive information gathering a lot when I first began homeschooling. I was anxious about such a new thing, and so to cope I would often research to the point beyond where it was helpful.. Some of the research was useful.    But using it for "comfort", beyond a certain point, was using the wrong tool for the wrong procedure. I should ideally be researching in order to learn and not to alleviate anxiety (at least, not more than necessary -- so often motives are mixed and obscure in this sort of thing!)

I can also see where the intellectual approach would be a problem when one person is looking for direct response and the other person is deviating into side tracks. This would be frustrating for the first person because it's not really acknowledging the situation.

Seeing that, I started wondering how I could do this differently in future. I grew up thinking that when two emotional people confronted each other emotionally, usually nothing came of it but harm. At the same time, I can see where trying to take the high ground and put an intellectual spin on relationship difficulties might just add to the problem. So what does one do to meet conflict constructively, but without sort of dropping the ball by defensive tactics?

I went looking for information on coping with conflict, and found this.   Conflict is one of the types of stressors where many people use their least positive coping mechanisms, probably because different types of conflict are probably way back in the deepest experience of most people who have grown up in families.

The basic idea seems to be that conflict should be done as constructively as possible.

The problem is, often conflict is very threatening. Hardly anyone I know handles that kind of threat well.    In fact, what Tolstoy says about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way seems particularly applicable in terms of relationship dynamics. There are definitely patterns that you can see -- some people avoid personal conflict and others seem to seek it out, etc. But everyone seems to bring their unique spin to it, and too often, it's fragmented bits and pieces from their basic temperament, their family's dynamics, and their reactions to their family dynamics, all so pre-rational that it's hard to even understand what is making oneself react in a given way, let alone the other person.   Very often, threatened people cling to a "right way" that isn't necessarily helpful, but that has been more or less engrained in them.

I don't feel like I understand much better how to manage this tricky kind of life problem. But I did get a better sense of how one might approach emotional things -- not by distancing from emotion OR getting submerged in it, but trying to figure out how to resolve things in a positive way, and looking at conflicts and life difficulties as things that can be helpful rather than just as dangers and drains to one's well-being.   Not that all conflicts can be resolved perfectly, but even with the ones that don't work out, sometimes you can still grow and become stronger in some way or another by tackling it rather than trying to put it at a distance.

After writing all that, I feel a bit like one of CS Lewis's "Men without Chests." He talks about how all the reasoning in the world won't help a man stand firm under fire, or rush into risk to help his buddy.. And that is very true. I feel like my approach is rather roundabout; all the same, he didn't say never to think, only that reducing everything down to pragmatics left you without even something as pragmatic as good common sense.

a little child to guide them

2011-11-29T19:00:00.000-08:00

The Old Testament reading for today is the famous Advent one from Isaiah 11

I wish I could quote the whole thing, but it would be too long!

On that day,A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse,
and from his roots a bud shall blossom.
The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him:
a Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
A Spirit of counsel and of strength,
a Spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD,

But he shall judge the poor with justice,
and decide aright for the land's afflicted.
He shall strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth,

Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
The calf and the young lion shall browse together,
with a little child to guide them.

Reading Nietzsche makes me realize how very paradoxical and non-intuitive this prophecy is.

I like Nietzsche better than I thought I would. His style annoys me, but it also has a vigor which most German philosophy lacks (and he is the first to acknowledge this himself : )). Purposely, it seems to me, he avoids system and goes for metaphors and epigrams. I think this is partly because he knows he is better off floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee rather than immersing himself. It wouldn't suit his talents to pursue philosophy doggedly, like Kant. Nor would it suit his message.

He starts off by supposing that Truth might be a woman:

Then what? Is there not groundfor suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have beendogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terribleseriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paidtheir addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods forwinning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; andat present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien—IF,indeed, it stands at all!

Though the first time I read this I was irritated, as I read on I found it interesting as a way to look back on the history of philosophy.   Traditionally, "wisdom begins in wonder".   A kind of receptivity is involved (which is depicted by Nietzsche as effeminate, and despised).

Later on, philosophy tried to go towards scientific/mathematical certainty, and these post-Cartesian philosophers are the ones Nietzsche seems to be taking aim at in the quote above.   I had always heard that Nietzsche was anti-Christian, and certainly this seems true but I didn't realize that he takes aim at EVERYONE -- he virulently despises positivists, skeptics, empiricists and idealists and in fact almost all pre- and post-Christian philosophers.    They are like clumsy, clueless suitors, and truth slips away from them, as if they brought their accounting books to show what good suitors they would be.

Nietzsche seems to try a third tack, with a straight declaration of Power as the main motive in human philosophy.    If you apply that to his supposition that Truth is a woman --- well, then.     I don't think his approach quite works because it can for the most part only take hold of the outward. It loses what it scorns, mocks and tries to conquer.

Isaiah's depiction of the poor and needy being restored to justice, and the lion lying down with the lamb, must be completely frustrating and absurd to someone like Nietzsche. In Beyond Good and Evil, so far he has made quite a few references to "slave morality", but never directly -- I suppose he goes into more details in his other books.

I think Chesterton talks about how the Christian tradition makes boast of the very things that seem most absurd to the world.   Individual Christians, surely, try to rationalize the faith and make it seem like a simple bourgeois or peasant system of morality that hands some of the strength back to the weak.   And even in worldly terms there is a certain kind of paradox, where the powerful end up tripping themselves up even in their power, and the poor and weak somehow survive and thrive.   But in fact, Christianity wouldn't make sense without the eschatological dimension.

So when reading Beyond Good and Evil, I feel like Nietzsche's criticisms of modern philosophy hit much closer to home than his criticisms of Christianity, which are only set in a cultural milieu.   It's a horizontal portrayal, like a cross-section.   So when people say that Nietzsche was the first to achieve a psychology of Christianity, they are misguided in many ways, but not least because Nietzsche (at least in this book) seems overwhelmingly, completely, wholly unaware of what Christianity is as a reality rather than as a societal manifestation.   Still, I like his depictions of the thing as a societal manifestation, because I think it separates the contingent elements from the actuality, which is something that needs to be done often: the Church does it, but gently and patiently, with a mind to preserving what is good; Nietzsche is more intolerant and unsympathetic, and doesn't care about preservation, but true Christianity is not going to be damaged by the sharp rattle of boots above the cave where the Infant Savior is hidden

Take Up and Read Update

2011-11-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today will be a quick post linking to what Chari and I are writing on our other blog, Take Up and Read:

First, there are still two more days to take advantage of a discount on the ebook version of A Picture Perfect Childhood, by Cay Gibson. For the rest of November, only $1.99 at Lulu.

Also, Chari has some ideas for celebrating a literary Advent:

It's a Picture Book Day: Advent Style
A picture book a day, for Advent!

Our Literature Evenings
How to share literature in the company of friends, family and/or neighbors

A Christmas Literature Evening
Book suggestions and how-tos for having a Christmas literature evening.

First Sunday in Advent -- a Song for You
We are going to try to share a favorite Advent hymn each Sunday of Advent.

As for my contributions:

I'm writing reviews of public domain books that might be of interest to homeschooling moms and/or kids. Here's the first:

The Rectory Children, a tale by Mrs Molesworth.

I also wrote about
Aidan and His Work,
and Our Family Shamrock.

Finally, my contribution to the ongoing Advent theme at TUAR:
The Jesse Tree.

I hope you come over to look!

Keeping House Book Study: Chapter Two

2011-11-28T00:30:00.000-08:00

(vintage kitchen by janet hill)

We are on Chapter Two of Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life: A Place to Live.

I will try to keep this short since probably everyone is cleaning up after Thanksgiving. But doesn't it seem timely to discuss A Place to Live just as many of us have spent this holiday getting together with our families of origin?

Home is at least two things, to us as Christians and indeed, as human beings. In this chapter Mrs Peterson explores these two different aspects. Home is a promise, a prophecy. God often talks about His plans for us in terms of an eternal home. Many Christian writers have emphasized the pilgrim aspect of our life on earth -- we are on a journey. We should not stop and rest too soon. St Augustine talks about this in On Christian Doctrine.

Suppose, then, we werewanderers in a strange country, and could not live happily awayfrom our fatherland, and that we felt wretched in our wandering,and wishing to put an end to our misery, determined to returnhome. We find, however, that we must make use of some mode ofconveyance, either by land or water, in order to reach thatfatherland where our enjoyment is to commence. But the beauty ofthe country through which we pass, and the very pleasure of themotion, charm our hearts, and turning these things which we oughtto use into objects of enjoyment, we become unwilling to hastenthe end of our journey; and becoming engrossed in a factitiousdelight, our thoughts are diverted from that home whose delightswould make us truly happy.

But home is also a present reality, according to Mrs Peterson.

But home is not just an eschatological expectation, not just an existential category, not just the object of our deepest longing. Home is a practical, daily reality. Even resident aliens need a place to cook and eat their meals, to put away their clothes, to lie down to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. Scripture suggests that God cares about those things.They are, or at least they can be, part of the day-to-day working out of God’s redemptive activity in the lives of individuals and in the world.

The book asks a series of questions which I will list, with summaries of the answers in the book.

What is a home?

Because the outside world is hard and standardized, home has become a place of relaxation, a place to express individuality. But it can also be such things as an inn (to welcome others), a sanctuary (a holy place, a set apart place), a castle (to protect its inhabitants from danger), and a city (a microcosm of society, where people learn to work together in individual ways)

Who makes a home?

Historically, people often left their families of origin only when they began a family of their own. Nowadays, adult children often move out long before they marry (though I have read things that suggest, sometimes deplore, that this is changing nowadays with changing economics). The book describes the various ways that people creatively form households apart from married life. One example in my life is my three boys up in Oregon. I like that they are able to live independently but still within a family context.

Whose job is housework?

Housework is necessary -- it has to be done, or its absence is deeply felt. You can't live well without housework getting done. Nowadays we tend to want to hand it to someone else, usually someone less highly educated than we are.   But perhaps this isn't the only or best way.    Keeping house is necessary and important, and it has advantages in keeping a natural life rhythm that we can easily forsake with our modern post-industrial dynamic.    Hardly anyone lives close to the land anymore, so perhaps keeping house is one of the last realms of living by human, natural rhythms and seasons.

The general idea is that we shouldn't try to simply hand it off to an inferior -- we may delegate for various reasons, but not because it's not worth time or effort, or because we think others are better suited to meaningless drudgery than we are.

What are the characteristics of housework?

Housework doesn't have to be perfect. Our mythology demands some impossibly high standard, with cute Disney birds and squirrels coming in to help us scrub everything to shining perfection. But real housework isn't like that.

Housework is:

Work. There are no magic wands. Sure, there are household appliances, but those can't replace our input altogether.   Generally those helps only change the nature of the work, not the fact that it is still work.

Creative -- yes, even the janitorial part, she says.   In echo of God, we bring order out of chaos, even when putting away the scattered toys or scrubbing the bathroom. Lack of housework is entropy, and we work in opposition to that.

Productive -- whether paid or not, it has to be done, and is for that reason a worthwhile contribution.

Providential -- as the universe requires God's continuing to keep it in existence, so we keep our household status in existence.

Incarnational -- we are all in danger of "hearing and not doing" (I know I am). God gets involved in daily, mundane realities. This is our role, too

Physical. One complaint about housework is its menial nature, but this is its very glory.   God came to earth as a worker.   He gave us bodies.   His creation is very physical.    Daily reminders of this are blessings, bringing us closer to the realities of things that we might be tempted to ignore.

Sacramental -- material and spiritual things come together in a sacrament.    Material things come to signify spiritual realities.

Imperfect -- yes, this is not our final home. We live in a broken world. Our houses will reflect that, but also hopefully reflect our efforts to "transform yourselves with the renewal of your mind."

Sabbath-oriented. There is never a ceasing in the need for work. Yet, God rested, and we are required to rest from our labors and allow others to rest, too. This is set very deeply in the stone tablets of our Law. Just because work never seems to end, we are tempted to let it consume our lives, but this is very definitely a temptation, not a virtue. The traditional vice of acedia or sloth included overwork as well as idleness.

We must let others rest, too. The woman who works all week outside the home and comes home and starts her second and weekend shift catching up with the housework is unjustly treated, either by herself or those around her who expect that of her.

This brings up one more thing that I wanted to mention though it is not in the book. I read a lot of British Victorian novels about people who live in the upper class.   Before household appliances, most educated people had servants to do a lot of the heavy housecleaning. In fact, one reason for opposition to universal education was that it would make the servant class discontented with their lot.   There is way more to be said here, but I notice that even during those days, having servants by no means meant the leisured class were best off leading an idle life. Most of the books I read contrast the industrious gentlefolk -- who managed their households, enriched the lives of the servants, gave opportunities to their relatives and others less fortunate, and helped the poor -- with the idle gentlefolk, who wasted their substance, mistreated their workers, and ignored the needs of those around them.

So their duty of "keeping house" remained and the responsibility even increased with the upper class. It did not work this way in practice, and there were many injustices, but this points out that household management is pretty much a universal duty in one way or other, whether it is done badly or well.    We will ALL be called up to account for what we were given and what we did with it.

Reading Nietzche during Advent

2011-11-27T11:05:00.001-08:00

I don't know why it is, but during Advent and Christmas I always seem to want to read modern philosophy. Perhaps because it reminds me what the world escaped when our Savior was born into that cave as an unknown infant. Every secular modern (post-Christian) philosophy is in some way a regression, a shutting out of what it doesn't care to deal with. As Chesterton says of the coming together of many things in the Nativity:

The second element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modem agnostic only looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between real and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about bard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modem moral philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life.

Anyway, this Advent I have started reading Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.   I might blog about it in a naive fashion, just as a reader.   That's why I thought I would mention that I'm reading it, so you aren't surprised if I suddenly start quoting and commenting a seemingly evil crazy person, especially during such a strange time of year. Winter slows me down and I find I can tackle harder and more unsympathetic books during this time.    "The people in darkness have seen a great light" -- it seems that I see the light more clearly when I better see the darkness that closes in when the light does not shine.

My long-term project is to read the Thomas Aquinas College syllabus.   It goes slowly, so slowly that I don't know if I'll finish before my last child finishes college, which will be in 15 years.   But when my kids are going to college, it helps me keep attached to them to read some of the things they are reading.    And I can ask their opinion if I run into a problem with reading books that are basically beyond my philosophical grounding.

Of course, the entire syllabus is not composed of dangerous books. There is a very fundamental emphasis on reading good things there, things that form the mind rather than test it. Nevertheless, students do read Hume, Spinoza, Machievelli, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, not to mention Lucretius and (I think) Empodocles.

The dean of TAC has been presenting some talks to the TAC board of directors and some of them are in article form here.

Here is one called:   Reckoning with Rousseau: Why Even Bad Books Can Be Great. He uses Rousseau as a paradigm to discuss why it's worthwhile to read "bad" books. So you could substitute the names of Nietzsche or Spinoza or Machiavelli since the general points apply across the board.

A few things he says there that speak to why I bother to use my limited brain power reading difficult books that I don't even agree with, and why I want my kids to go to a college where erroneous but influential thinkers are read and discussed seriously:

Rousseau matters because he had a large effect on the world in both its thinking and the unfolding events of history. ....Without understanding Rousseau it is very difficult to understand the world around us, or even ourselves as children of the modern world.

he is answering some of the greatest questions that can occupy our minds: what is man? what is his purpose in life? These are timeless questions. These are questions that we have to address if we aim at liberal education.

So Rousseau is in fundamental opposition to us; it is important that our students not shy away from this but rather take it head on, reading and savoring his words and ideas, not lightly dismissing him, but examining the merits of his claims and arguments.

when we judge that Rousseau has erred, we want to see why he went astray and what truth is mixed in with his error.

we learn best when we take into account different and opposing arguments. We do not make good judgments, intellectual or practical, when we avoid conflict.

These are all things I agree with. Dr Kelly also says:

We trust that sober and careful reason is not lightly led astray, especially when it is bolstered by the blessing of Faith. Thus class does not begin with the tutor instructing the students that Rousseau is badly mistaken. Rather, we examine his arguments, in his own words, in the context of a serious discussion and with the Faith as a guiding light.

Here is where I feel a little less confident about myself as a reader, for several reasons. Though staunchly loyal to my Faith, I am a convert who was educated in very secular environments deeply influenced by Rousseaun and Lockean methodology and philosophy.

I am not reading with the guidance of a tutor and with the support of fellow students.

I am not approaching the syllabus systematically -- I take it up in bits and pieces.

Thus, I am most definitely not the Very Model of A Sober Careful Reasoner.

On the other hand, that doesn't make my need to know and judge any the less. For the very reason that I was bathed in Romanticism, Enlightenment rationalism, and received a genuine but unrigorous Christian catechesis in my younger days, I need to better understand, from the source, the currents of thought in the books I read and the society I live in.

Everyone philosophizes, either well or badly. So it's better to try to improve.

I'm not saying that this is for everyone. And I don't do it year around. Most of the time I read the Bible, and the saints, and devotional and philosophical works I trust. And there are times I don't read much at all, except for practical works and read-alouds.

And I think that just living without reading is sufficient. I know lots of people who read little but act wisely and live well.    But since I have opportunity to read, and will read billboards and cereal boxes if I don't have anything else, and I like to tackle books that make me think, I read hard stuff sometimes because it's there, you know?

So there is my rationale.

So far I can't help feeling sorry for Nietzsche. He makes the telling if reductive point that philosophy is to some degree autobiography. And certainly here his form reflects his content, since I hear misery and rage and pride in his approach. He debunks other philosophies sharply and acutely, but so far (I'm just in the early pages) doesn't seem to be able to proclaim his own systematically. And I think that's part of his intent, which seems sad in itself, like sound and fury.   He does say some very good things, though.   Some other time I'll quote the bits I like, but this post probably is trying your patience quite enough.    For some reason I can't get my friends and family to listen for very long to this kind of thing (wonder why?) so I resort to my blog because my readers can so easily click away if they aren't interested.

If you have read to the end, you are either a rare kindred spirit, or a very patient and benevolent reader, or someone who has set their Google notifications to give Nietzsche alerts (that happened to me once when I mentioned Ayn Rand on my other blog).    Anyway, thanks for reading to the end and you are totally welcome to comment in any of those cases!

Cultivating Individuality?

2011-11-26T22:44:00.001-08:00

I am reading a Kindle book called Guide to the Kindergarten and Intermediate Class and Moral Culture of Infancy. I thought this was interesting, from the preface to the second edition:

The only mistake in idea which I see that I made in my "Guide," was making it the object of the teacher to cultivate the individualities of each pupil especially. This is not even desirable, and would require the intuitive genius of Froebel in every single teacher. In a true art of education, individualities will be tenderly respected; but it is not what is individual, but what is common to all (or that universal of[v] human nature which rises into the divine creative), which is to be cultivated especially. Every process of Froebel's Kindergarten is good for all children, and, interfering with nothing original, leaves their individualities free to express themselves sufficiently. For individual varieties are irrefragable, and give piquancy and beauty to human life, except they are pampered,—when they become deformities. To follow universal laws in their orderly development, ensures a necessary harmony with others, while a margin is always to be left for invention, which is what gives conscious freedom, and makes obedience no longer blind and passive, but intelligent and active; every healthy instinct and affection becoming at last spiritual law.

By the way, looking up the authors, Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody, I find they were quite eminent people. Mary Mann was married to Horace Mann, and Elizabeth Peabody worked at Bronson Alcott's Temple School, while their younger sister Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne. As well as having interesting connections, they were also well known as educationists and publishers in their own right.

What I thought about this quote was the distinction between teaching directly to individualities and teaching what is common to humans, with respect for individualities.   It seems related to something Charlotte Mason said about not letting children too narrowly follow their own bent.   Though one might find his meat in Plato and another in Peter Pan, it is good to be given access to both.

I think this probably speaks to the learning styles, too.   One child may be more auditory and another more kinesthetic, but keeping everything directed mostly to one learning style seems to do the child a disservice in not giving him practice with the other areas.

I am not sure how much more I'll read of the book -- you see in the quote that there is some of that soft Transcendental type of language.   It takes a lot of energy to read practical books where the philosophy might be out of whack with one's own.    But it was sort of fun to find out that the authors were sisters and had such interesting lives and connections.

Cleaning When Guests Are On the Way

2011-11-24T05:15:00.001-08:00

I was going to post this before Thanksgiving actually arrived but maybe is useful too for this pre-Christmas season.

Emergency To Do List for when guests are arriving unexpectedly.

In my case, I wasn't THAT short of time; my guests weren't literally on their way there. I had Monday and Tuesday.. But I was still tired from being sick so long and we had other things going on, so I wanted to have enough margin to make sure I got to all the basics.

It was the first time I'd actually really cleaned the house in about a month! Yikes! But it is reasonably clean now.    It helped that I did keep up with laundry and kitchen clean-up during that month.   A little maintenance goes a long way.

Also I've found that minimizing clutter helps immensely with clean-up.    A simplicity blog I read (wish I could remember which one) said that if you are facing disorder, think in terms of discarding something. That has been really helpful to me.   If I face my disordered house I find that what is troubling to me in it is that there is something superfluous sitting there. When I find out what it is and take care of it, the whole outlook is way better.   I really don't mind restoring order; the depressing part is feeling like there is junk there.. stuff that's not really necessary to have around.   So going straight to the heart of that takes care of a great burden. What remains becomes more precious and more worthy to be treated carefully.

Here are some more Quick Clean links:

What To Do When Your Mother in Law is Coming Over
Clean a House Quickly
Clean Your House in Under 20 Minutes

Another advantage to a quick clean is that it makes you feel more motivated to maintain the momentum and make some real progress on your home when your guests have gone home.   I intend to do some deeper cleaning during Advent since it seems like an appropriate time to do that "nesting" thing in preparation for the birth of Our Lord.    I suppose it would be better to start with that in October but I usually end up doing some or most of it in December since that is when I am digging into storage, decorating and so on anyway.

Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving!

getting better

2011-11-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

Apparently there is an Art of Getting Well!    I am not one of the chronically ill who are described in this book, but I do feel like I have been sick for a long time. I got ill with a severe cold or possibly flu in the earlier part of October, and now it is late November, and two mornings ago was the first time during that time that I woke up feeling some energy.

I think it had to have been some kind of walking pneumonia. It wasn't really that bad because I could still sit and write, and if I REALLY had to do something, I could get it done. But I cut way back on everything during that time.     Perhaps I should have gone to the doctor, but we were traveling so much that it seemed difficult to schedule it in, and I was feeling very resistant to taking antibiotics.

When I was a child I used to love the day or two after being quite ill, like with a stomach flu or a fever or in adolescence, with severe monthly cramps and nausea.   Everything seemed brand new, like the outdoors when the sun is shining right after a rainstorm. There seemed to be so many possibilities. Just feeling no pain was a blessing.   And then added to that, you could actually enjoy the things around you again -- like the difference between surfing and barely keeping your head above water. Or like Dorothy in the movie when she steps out of her house into Oz.

The same sort of thing happens after you have a baby, I noticed during my childbearing years!    They say it takes six weeks to recover fully, but I usually think I feel better after about two weeks. I always pretty much tried to do everything as I normally would, and get somewhat irritated at myself when I flake out. Then a day comes when I actually DO feel better and realize that I was just managing before. There is no mistaking the difference, but it simply takes time, and though you can will yourself into functioning, you can't will yourself into being better.

Being sick for over a month, though not much of an ordeal compared to what many suffer chronically or acutely, did give me a preview of what it might be like to have an ongoing health condition.    It was hard not to be able to count on normal resources.   You adjust, but it sometimes feels like you are living in a different body.

This Sunday, though I still didn't move around much, I actually spent planning and putting things together, and I've started a notebook for listing household and holiday things to get done. Even though I do a lot of planning on the computer I still seem to need paper to actually write down the tasks as I go along through the day. And not only that, but I could focus on my husband and kids' conversations, which I was not doing very well before. SUCH a difference.

Then on Monday I actually cleaned the house! And got the kids helping too!

While I was on a roll on Sunday, I listed a bunch of Advent resources over at Top Meadow Study Center, and wrote a pre-planning post over at Take Up and Read.     I'm going to actually try to work some of them.    I am finally starting to understand Pinterest a little and it is actually not so overwhelming as it was at first.    It seems you have to kind of adjust your brain and eyes a certain way in order to get something out of it besides confusion, but if you can make the switch, it's rewarding.

My daughter is coming home for Thanksgiving, but my older sons aren't going to be able to make it. That is a first, and sad! But it is so close to Christmas that I can live with it.

I have a few prayer intentions I could use prayers for, though they concern other people and will have to stay private for that reason.

Also, Matt Wise who is in the ICU still could really use prayers to turn a corner.   Some things are improving, but other things are not looking good.     If you have anything difficult going on during this season maybe you will feel called to offer some of it up for him and his family as well as this little premie whose mom I last saw as a teen (she's a little older than that now but not much).

Keeping House Book Study: Second Part of Chapter One

2011-11-21T00:30:00.000-08:00

(vintage kitchen by janet hill)

This is about Chapter One, part 2 of Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life. The reading starts with "Divine Domesticity" and goes on to the end of the chapter.

What would happen if we were to look at housework and the doers of housework (whether “housewives” or not) not through the postindustrial and postfeminist lenses provided to us by our culture but through the lens of Christian scripture?

This section invites us to consider God as a housekeeper and someone whose activity is often mediated through household things. This is a theme also brought out in a book I studied last year, Splendor in the Ordinary, but in a slightly different way.

First, Psalm 104 describes God as someone who builds a house and furnishes it

he stretches out the heavens like a tent
and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.

Then there is the familiar Genesis story. God creates the cosmos and prepares a garden for the man and woman, providing everything they need. Later on, throughout the Pentateuch, he feeds his people, provides for them, gives them shelter. In fact, it might be interesting to go through Scripture from the perspective of domesticity, noting all the times that love and concern is associated with food, shelter and provision. As Mrs Peterson notes:

God’s own presence with his people is mediated through dwelling places and domestic activities.

The story of Abraham offering hospitality to angels unaware is well known. In this case there is a reversal in that Abraham and Sarah are privileged to "provide" for God and His messengers!

Later on this interesting prototype of man being privileged to offer provision to God is fulfilled in the incarnation of Our Lord, the Son of God. As Chesterton writes, " the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle" He, the eternal Word, allowed Himself to be dependent upon an earthly man and woman.

“The Word became flesh, and pitched his tent among us,” (John 1:14).

Jesus describes himself as one who has “no place to lay his head,” but he nonetheless shows himself remarkably conversant with the details of housekeeping. He speaks in parables about houses and householders, about sweeping and lamplighting, about vessels that appear clean on the outside but are soiled within. He enters the homes of others to eat with them and concerns himself with others’ meals, as, for example, a little girl whom he heals: “Give her something to eat,” he tells her parents (Mark 5:43).

However, Jesus makes clear that though domestic duties are worthy of respect, they are not the highest duties. The story of Mary and Martha makes this clear. Jesus does not tell Mary her duty is in the kitchen; on the other hand, nor does He rebuke Martha for concerning herself with domestic duties -- merely her attitude in scolding Mary for not doing them (and it's a very gentle, loving rebuke, too). The message seems to be that domesticity is worthy, not just in itself, but as one way of expressing devotion to God.

Later Jesus explicitly brings out what one might call the sacramental character of humble domestic activities. In Matthew 25: 31-46 we see that loving our neighbor involves precisely those humble, often despised activities of feeding, sheltering and visiting "the least of these".

There is often a prophetic note associated with domesticity:

“In my Father’s house are many rooms,” he assures his disciples (John 14:2). “If someone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).

God often shows His promises of forgiveness and constancy in terms of provision, food and shelter,
and His displeasure by exile and homelessness.

“a peaceful habitation, secure dwellings, quiet resting places”(Isaiah 32:18).

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Psalm 23

“Then the king said to the servants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness

The conclusion Mrs Peterson draws from all these scriptural figures (and they could be multiplied many times over) is that domesticity has a spiritual dimension. We are both physical and spiritual beings, and the two are intermingled, so that what we do in the physical dimension gathers spiritual significance.    She suggests that this is one reason that even secular home organizing manuals often talk about decluttering and cleaning as if it would somehow restore your spirit or at least help with psychological and even physical health.   When I was searching for housecleaning checklists yesterday, I found some sites that instructed you on how to meditate while housecleaning.   The tie between the two things seems paradoxical, but I think Mrs Peterson has explained it well by pointing out how both housekeeping and spirituality are at the heart of deep human needs.

Once when my husband and I were house-searching, we viewed the for-sale home of a realtor. It was massively, hugely cluttered. There were boxes everywhere -- and gaudy, consumeristic objects tossed helter-skelter. It was the very profile of psychological mess. Looking at her house, you couldn't help feeling you were at ground zero of a crisis in this woman's life. I think realizing this is almost unavoidable. There is, indeed, unhealthy perfection too - everyone's seen houses where the immaculate nature of the surroundings seem rigid, sterile, and fixed to an unhealthy degree.    That looks somehow wrong too. The balances differ according to one's season of life but certainly one's house inevitably says a lot about one's inner self.     Perhaps that's partly a good thing since I can get clues from my outer environment that I don't necessarily notice just by evaluating my inner self.   Right now, the house reflects the fact that I have been sick for over a month and out of town for at least two of the five weeks.    My whole life feels slightly dusty and disordered.

I am not going to have time to do justice to the word "litany" which Mrs Peterson brings up here. It is a key word, of course, since it's in the subtitle of the book.   I hope to bring it up again in later posts. But perhaps one of you who are reading along will focus on that aspect of the chapter? Anyway, here's a quote:

A litany, as Christians have traditionally understood it, is a form of prayer that includes the announcement of various needs or requests, each followed by a response like “Amen” or “Lord, have mercy.”.... Litanies tend to be both repetitive and comprehensive, and in both of these characteristics there is a certain analogy to housework. A litany is typically about a lot of different things; it includes requests for God’s assistance or care on many different fronts at once. In so doing, a litany draws together the disparate threads of our needs and our concerns and tempers their potentially overwhelming nature.....

Housework, too, is about a lot of different things. There are errands to be run, meals to be planned, clothes to be laundered, messes to be dealt with. .... But there is a fundamental unity and focus to housework, too

That idea of disparity brought together into unity really spoke to me.   I am one of those people who operate in the "big picture". When I first started homeschooling, every time I ran into a glitch, I would get out my notebook and basically try to revamp my whole system.    I still am tempted to do that and have to really focus to avoid the temptation.   I've learned to operate in cycles and "seasons" to bring out different emphases at different times.

With housekeeping, the myriad of disparate activities and how they have to fall into a proper hierarchy, constantly throws me off balance.   Either I can't see the forest for the trees, or I focus on the forest and the trees escape my notice.    Sure, I've learned coping mechanisms, lots of hacks and strategies, but it hasn't become totally natural to me.   Especially as my family WILL keep growing and changing, so nothing stays the same for long!

Just saying that it helps me to read "big picture" books like this because it helps me find meaning in the little bits and pieces.   As with homeschooling, I think for me housekeeping operates best in a seasonal, cyclical form where I focus on different things at different times.    It may look different for other people.

I used to wonder if I was just being inconsistent by following the cyclical approach.   I've taken heart in the fact that the Church year operates this way, too.   Different things are emphasized at different times, but over all, there is a continuity and building effect.   There are always opportunities for renewal and emphasis in diverse areas but in the context of repetition.   God gives us chances to do it over and over again until we get it "right" (though thinking about it, I think those repetitions over many years signify something more like completion or richer shading than actually getting an A+).    Praise Him! I need those chances!

Please follow your own themes or consider these questions (sorry, they came out sounding like literature exam questions -- you can tweak them if you like!)

Are there any other Bible verses that have significance for you that relate to this domesticity theme?
What do you think of this quote? " Litanies tend to be both repetitive and comprehensive, and in both of these characteristics there is a certain analogy to housework."
What are some ways you see spiritual significance in the ordinary things of everyday life?
How is repetition in household matters a "benediction" (see Kierkegard) as opposed to "torture" (Simone Beauvoir) ?

Thank you for all comments and links to blog posts, I am really grateful for other perspectives! I know it's a busy time of year for everyone but I'm glad to have something like this to keep working at through all the busy-ness and distraction!

Poetry, the Imagination, Morals, Paradox, Mystery, Sensibles, and the Observer Effect

2011-11-20T00:30:00.000-08:00

I had so much fun catching up on my Google Reader today. You can see my shared items on the sidebar but here's a few heavy but interesting ones I wanted to save especially to go back to later.

Somehow all those things in the title seem related to me, but I can't quite figure out how. How about you?

-- Starving the Imagination -- Russell Kirk at Paying Attention to the Sky

Yet this is no effective way to impart a knowledge of norms: direct moral didacticism, whether of the Victorian or the twentieth century variety, usually awakens resistance in the recipient, particularly if he has some natural intellectual power.

How Poetry Finds Laws for Moral Existence -- Russell Kirk, at Paying Attention to the Sky

Sheer Experience, As Franklin Suggested, Is The Teacher Of Born Fools.
Of course it was not by books alone that the normative understanding of the framers of the Constitution, for instance, was formed. Their apprehension of norms was acquired also in family, church, and school, and in the business of ordinary life. But that portion of their normative understanding which was got from books did loom large. For we cannot attain very well to enduring standards if we rely simply on actual personal experience as a normative mentor. Sheer experience, as Franklin suggested, is the teacher of born fools.
Our lives are too brief and confused for most men to develop any normative pattern from their private experience; and as Newman wrote, “Life is for action.” Therefore we turn to the bank and capital of the ages, the normative knowledge found in revelation, authority, and historical experience, if we seek guidance in morals, taste, and politics. Ever since the invention of printing, this normative understanding has been expressed, increasingly in books, so that nowadays most people form their opinions, in considerable part, from the printed page. This may be regrettable sometimes; it may be what D. H. Lawrence called “chewing the newspapers”; but it is a fact. Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master.

Organizing Curriculum -- Why History? at Life, Books and Education

But why use history as the organizing principal – especially if it has never been part of classical education in the past? I've been thinking about this question ever since I read the preface to Norms and Nobility. David Hick’s writes, “Although in my curriculum proposal I use history as the paradigm for contextual learning, the ethical question ‘What should one do?’ might provide an even richer context for acquiring general knowledge.”

Also, a series on Mysteries and the Higher Mystery, by Daniel McInerny, at High Concepts

Mystery as Paradox

What good and bad paradoxes possess in common is the shock derived from contradiction: paradox is [apparent] contradiction, explicit or implied” (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 15). That shock may occur in a fragment of Heraclitus or in the Gospels, but it is perhaps most often encountered, though usually incognito, in tales of mystery and suspense. In fact, G.K. Chesterton, the master of paradox, in Heretics defines paradox as mystery (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 14).

Sherlock Holmes

The Holmesian “Clue.” The clue is a bogus epiphany. In itself it has no ontological significance. It doesn’t open to contemplative penetration the intelligible depths of some object; rather it suggests to the quick deductive wit discursive attention to the superficies of a dozen other objects. The clue and the chain of reasoning function, like a jigsaw puzzle, in two dimensions. The sleuth’s reconstruction of a crime works at the level of efficient causes only; the epiphany implies an intuitive grasp of material, formal, and final causes as well (Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, p. 176).

Father Brown

the Chestertonian sleuth is not about “clues” as much as he is a reader of the human heart. “the only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will,” “In Defence of Detective Stories.”

Finally, James Chastek at Just Thomist wrote on the topic Could sensation make an essential division in physical theory?

Seen from this angle, the purely relative difference between the very small and the classically sized takes on an absolute value. Sensation uses physical interaction, and the relative distinctions of large and small make essential differences in physical interaction. Hitting a bug with your car is not the same thing as hitting a tree.

and Catholic sci fi novelist Mike Flynn followed up on that one with a post Heisenberg Dances with Aristotle.

in Aristo-Thomism, the sense object is a compound of
a thing in the world and
the subjective/personal dispositions of the one sensing.
IOW, the observer affects the thing observed. The proper sensibles really do exist in the world AND they are combined with observer’s subjective disposition. Why don't we call this "the observer effect."Funny. That has a familiar ring to it.

A Tale of Two British Tales, or What I Read While Traveling

2011-11-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

While we were on the road I read two atypical short novels by two major British writers, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy.   Both authors are deeply English and alike in that they wrote about the oddities of the class system, the moral dilemmas in English life, and both created their own fictional countryside to reflect their themes and perceptions.   Both the novellas were early works of eminent authors who are better known for very different styles of work.   I thought I would informally compare and contrast since after all, I have nothing better to do, but if you want to just skip on, the short version is that I recommend both the books if you happen to enjoy reading well-written, insightful depictions of the country from which our language originates.   I do enjoy that sort of book, so I enjoyed both the books.

The Trollope novel, really more like a novella with a doom-laden trajectory, was called An Eye for an Eye.

Trollope is better known for his lengthy and detailed Barchester Chronicles and Palliser cycle.   The former concern societal and moral issues among the Anglican clergy and the latter concern British political life. All his books deal with moral dilemmas that spring from the rules of upper class life in 19th century England. I read both these cycles several times a long time ago.

This particular novella draws on his experience in Ireland early in his adult life.   The major events in the book actually take place near the Cliffs of Moher, which we got to visit a few years ago on a family trip to Ireland. These cliffs are the most beautiful and desolate I have ever seen, so the story of despair and tragic events seemed very suitably located. My husband Kevin sacrificed a rear view mirror on our journey to that spot, because the only road to the cliffs is a one-laner along a steep drop, and he had to pull off to the side to let an oncoming tour bus go by.   In the process he scraped off the side mirror of our rental. Not a pretty picture, but much easier to cope with than what happens to the main characters in this story.

Fred Neville is the Anglican nephew of a British earl and suddenly becomes his heir.
Kate O'Hara is the beautiful, Catholic and isolated only daughter of a gentlewoman who has shut herself away in this wild corner of Ireland because of a scapegrace husband.

The rest follows from the inflexible laws of English society and religion of which fans of 19th century British novels are well aware by now.

I will not say more, but I do recommend the tale if you don't mind a bit of tragedy. I am not spoiling anything by saying this because the tragic note is introduced clearly in a prologue where the woman in the insane asylum keeps repeating over again, "An Eye for an Eye!"

Now, Thomas Hardy is well known for this kind of tragic tale of ill-starred love, but the novella Under the Greenwood Tree, or The Mellstock Quire, is quite in another vein from his better known works.   While I have read several of his books, I do not like his writing. I love his style, but I dislike the post-Christian pagan themes and plots.     Here I am able to get his literary style with a light touch and a happy-ish ending.    I had watched the movie version of the book with my daughter several years back. It is charming and features Kelsey Hawes whom you may know from the movie versions of Wives and Daughters and Our Mutual Friend. She is so beautiful and charming on-screen.

Anyway, the book wasn't quite like the movie, which takes the love affair somewhat more seriously than the book does.   But the book brings out the full value of the robust Mellstock Quire (or choir) and the humanity of the players and their family.   I loved this book. Some of the humor and careful description of the prosaic elements of the English working class reminded me somewhat of LM Montgomery. It made me regretful that Thomas Hardy seemed to become so melancholic and arreligious in his later work, even though in this Pastoral or Georgic work, you don't quite see the full development of his talent.

I thought it was funny that I accidentally selected a Trollope work that was somewhat Hardy-esque, and a Hardy work that was somewhat Trollope-ian! (though not really, because Hardy's book is firmly set among the working class, and Trollope doesn't really write about that class at all).

I really enjoyed them both and if you have an E-reader, you can read them both for free in the public domain.

Travel and Autumn Leaves

2011-11-18T13:09:00.001-08:00

Just a couple of days after we returned from Disneyland, we were off again in our trusty 1998 Nissan Quest. This time, heading north to visit my older sons up in Duck Country --- Eugene, Oregon, where they were all born but hadn't lived for 15 years until they moved back there last winter and summer.

It definitely was salubrious for ducks up there as it was cold and rainy most of the time.   We meant to stay until Sunday, but the weather forecast predicted snow in Ashland and above, and we didn't want to have to hassle with chains and blocked lanes, so we left early.

Sean is still in a cast but fortunately, doesn't need pins in his feet as the doctor was afraid    That would have meant he was out of action for another five months so this is good news.   He doesn't know yet when he will actually be able to weight-bear again. Right now he gets around on crutches.

I still have a cough after more than a month so I think it is getting into sinusitis/walking pneumonia territory. I decided that today I was going to alternate Getting Things Done with sitting around resting and writing and reading. It is working fairly well so far today. Kevin said he would make dinner -- bless him.

The rest of this post will be photos because I love autumn leaves and we don't really get them up here in Conifer Country, and I thought friends of the boys might like to see a couple of pictures of where they are living now.

Aidan walking down the short hall


A view of their apartment from outside -- they have a tiny porch enclosure.

Aidan took this picture from the porch

Leaves

Another Leaf


Still More Leaves

Still More Leaves

And Yet More

Something to Remind Myself

2011-11-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

Really liked this in an "ouch" sort of way

Mom's on the Computer
(Spunky Homeschool)

(to the tune of Cat's in the Cradle)

HT Gloria at Smoothing Stones

I love Harry Chapin and was old enough to feel tragic about his untimely death in a car crash in 1981 so here's the embedded version of the song.

Boys and Bringing in Groceries

2011-11-15T02:00:00.000-08:00

~~Last week~~ About three weeks ago I read Boys and Food by Rachel at Testosterhome.

Feed the hungry. That’s a corporal work of mercy. And during this season of my life, it’s how I’m building the church.

Food is my boys’ love language and I continue to be amazed at the difference it makes in our home. On those magical days when the boys come home to find the larders full, I can sense the difference.

Psychologically, I don’t quite understand it. Maybe they feel secure, maybe they feel at peace. Perhaps it all speaks to that innate hunter/gatherer aspect of a male personality, but that wouldn’t totally explain things because with that theory they would be the ones out shopping.

This came back to my mind a few days ago. There was a planned power outage, and since husband Kevin works at home, and needs a computer for his work, and therefore couldn't work, he decided to go shopping. In our rural area, "going shopping" means an hour trip to Costco or WinCo to stock up the garage freezer and the pantry.

Kevin has traditionally been the actual hunter/gatherer here because for a long time I was the primary caretaker for toddlers and medically fragile children and it made more sense for him to do the grueling trip and cruising of the aisles. He can keep prices in his head and even do a quick $/lb type calculation on the wing, while for me it takes longer and doesn't go well with boys being attracted towards the candy aisle.

Anyway, we have had a system in place for close to a decade and a half now where when Dad pulls in with an SUV-load of groceries, all the kids go out and unload them and put them away. It is about the closest our family ever comes to automated regularity. The car drives up, every kid in the house piles outside and starts hauling groceries.

Nowadays, "all the kids" means Kieron, Aidan and Paddy.   But it still happens. This is one chore where (1) no one has to be reminded (2) no one complains. It's always been somewhat of a mystery to me and still is.

But now I am wondering if some of Rachel's musings could help explain it. Some ideas that come to mind:

(1) This literal "bringing home the bacon" strikes an innate responsive chord in them. ... wakes up their inner hunter/gatherer.
(2) It is something innately and directly worthwhile.   They go, they see, they conquer. The food goes right from the car to the kitchen counter to the larder. It is subdued and prepared. It allows them to use their strength and see, in return, a tangible result.
(3) It is about FOOD. And food is a love language; it speaks to the heart of boys.

Rachel also mentioned something that runs straight to the heart of boys -- the favored Bringing Home of Treats.

Husband Kevin is very good about bringing home a couple of food items that are more "for fun". Probably most of us have our memories stocked with a few stories from the Little House books or elsewhere, where the parents bring home a couple of treats, like sugar sticks, along with the basic staples when they come back from a trip "to town".

Does anyone have the Pathway Readers around the house?   These storybooks transcend the "reader" genre. They are about Amish kids and often involve a character trait, but in my opinion aren't sappy or over-heavy-handed like some moral tales.    In one story I remember, a boy is aggrieved because his parents have come back from shopping with ONLY basics, no extra treat.   He complains, and his father tells him that the basics really are the treat -- that he is blessed because he has plenty to eat of nourishing food. He shouldn't get annoyed because his parents didn't bring home any extra.

I know I said these tales aren't overly heavy handed, and the way I've told this one sounds like it is. But trust me.   It stuck in my mind because of course, we are like this with God sometimes. We complain because we don't get the perks, because life has a few difficult parts, and forget to acknowledge that breathing and eating and being sheltered are really, really good things.

Still, what Rachel says is true. There is something about a Treat that speaks to a child's heart. The treat doesn't have to be huge. Laura Ingalls and her siblings were thrilled by candy sticks at Christmas. But treats seem to connotate plenty and abundance. God does this, after all. "Our cups overflow" -- overflowing cups might seem wasteful to a thrifty farm family, but there is something about the occasional extra that is like honey to the heart.   In that respect, even though the Amish father was right in teaching his son to have a grateful heart, the boy was on to something too, even if reacting badly. He was recognizing that treats have a language of their own.

The other reason that the story has stuck in my mind is that none of my kids has ever complained about what we brought home.   And it's not that my kids never complain.   And it's not that they don't get as thrilled about fun food as any other growing boys. Sometimes they express happiness if they see one of their favorite foods come out of the cooler or grocery bags. But they just don't express disappointed expectations.

Again, I wonder if it's because of that food as a love language thing.   Maybe they feel like acting disappointed would be like telling Dad he was a failure as a hunter-gatherer and that just seems to infringe too much on the relationship.   There seems to be an element of good-sportsmanship there, of loyalty to the father.   I am only guessing based on observation.    But it seems like a good trait to me. If their attitude to the groceries reflects their attitude towards God's providence, I hope they will be joyful about the "treats" but grateful and content with the sufficiencies.

Keeping House Book Study: Chapter One

2011-11-14T00:30:00.000-08:00

Housework is a beginning, not an end. But it is a beginning—not a sidetrack, not a distraction, but a beginning, and an essential one at that—in the properly Christian work of, among other things, meeting the everyday needs of others, whether those others be our fellow household members, our near neighbors, or people more sociologically or geographically distant from ourselves.

I divided this first chapter up into two weeks because there was so much content. It covers both the history and sociology of housekeeping AND the scriptural references to housekeeping, which were both meaningful parts of the book for me. So I thought we could easily find enough to discuss for two weeks. After that we'll try to read a chapter a week. The chapters are quite short so I hope it won't be too much even during the holiday seasons which are coming up fast!

This week I am reading What's Christian about Housework? and stopping just before the section called Divine Domesticity.   I am sorry that these two sections are not very practical.   I think as we go through the book we will get more into implementation and practical helps, but perhaps it's better to consider the principles before getting into how they work out in everyday life.

In the first part of the chapter, Mrs Peterson tells about her upbringing from the perspective of keeping house.   As a child, she liked to cook and her mother showed her how to make a few simple dishes.   She doesn't remember liking laundry, but her mother taught her anyway, and one of her brothers got very good at folding, to the extent that he was widely admired by old ladies at the laundromat.   She never learned to like cleaning much, perhaps because her mother didn't care for it.

As an adult in grad school, Mrs Peterson went through the severe illness and eventual death of her first husband. During those years, she was made sharply aware that the basics of feeding, clothing and caring for one's loved ones are more fundamental and crucial than the academics everyone else was focusing on.   She carried that awareness into her second marriage and eventual motherhood.

I retained the long-held sense, of which I had been made so consciously aware during those difficult years of illness, that housekeeping—cooking, cleaning, laundry, all the large and small tasks that go into keeping a household humming along—was not a trivial matter but a serious one. People need to eat, to sleep, to have clothes to wear; they need a place to read, a place to play, a place into which to welcome guests and from which to go forth into the world. These are the needs that housework exists to meet.

Being an academic and Christian, she looked for books on this topic, but could find none, which surprised her. She delved into the history and sociology of housework and found that as the actual amount of housekeeping done has declined, the "myth" of housekeeping has gone upwards.

There are lots of fancy magazines devoted to cooking and cleaning and "keeping house" but it is pictured as sort of a leisure fantasy activity. The dailiness and sometimes hard work of housekeeping is not usually mentioned. You are encouraged to believe (as with so many things in our culture) that if you buy the right products everything will be easy and look glamorous.

There is also a note of resentment in our cultural approach to housework. Who should do it, especially as everyone is increasingly spending much of their time out of the home? Does it change as circumstances change? Why are women commonly given most of the responsibility even when they are the primary breadwinners in their family? What about retired couples, or adult kids living at home?

Yet at the same time, everyone still seems to have a longing to have someone take care of us, somehow.

This note of longing is the other side of the frazzled reality that is housework for many people. Shouldn’t home be a place of refreshment, of nurturance, of beauty? Why do the house, and the housework, seem so out of control? Isn’t there a better way?

There is also the promise of decluttering schemes and home improvement projects that organizing your house will make deep changes in your life. So keeping house still seems to be thought of as deeply connected to our inner selves.

Finally, there is the fact that while keeping house is somewhat glamorized in magazines and our own nostalgia for "someone to take care of us", and seems to be deeply connected with our sense of self and of family relationships, it is also looked down upon.

In fact, anyone who takes too much time to cook (or clean or iron) runs the risk of being regarded as a parasitic blot on society. One study on attitudes toward gender and the workplace found that “while ‘business women’ were rated as similar in competence to ‘business men’ and ‘millionaires,’ ‘housewives’ were rated as similar in competence to the ‘elderly,’ ‘blind,’ ‘retarded,’ and ‘disabled.’” Attitudes like these appear not to reflect gender bias pure and simple, for if they did, businesswomen would presumably rank lower than businessmen. They appear, on the contrary, to be a reflection of judgments about housewives as such. I have a friend, a housewife, who says she cringes every time she fills out a form and is asked to state her occupation. Is it any wonder why?

Mrs Peterson says that all this tangled mixture of attitude towards housework is a legacy of our society's history.    Before the Industrial Revolution, the idea of "staying at home" would have little meaning since almost everyone worked at home -- man, woman and child.    The etymology of "husband" as well as "housewife" both derive from "house" and were related to the primary tasks of man and woman -- caring for their house and land.   The spheres of work were different but fairly complementary.

This changed as factories and industries grew.   Now man, woman, and child all left the home to earn their keep. Child labor laws changed this for children, and compulsory school replaced compulsory labor.

But though now women went out to work as well as men, the house seemed to become the main responsibility of the woman.   Things like World Wars and feminist movement would flux the situation and bring more women out into the workforce, but nothing changed radically.   Outside the home work was still considered somehow more real and dignified than keeping house.

Again, sentiments and attitudes run very deep and complex in these areas.   Whether work is "paid" or not seems to be more important than whether it is important or not.    Chesterton remarked on this when he said:

How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?

It seems to come down to a couple of things. People think public work is more important than private, and paid work is more important than unpaid. The book does not go into why this would be. I think that it could probably become a book in itself. But certainly, industrialization has had a major impact.

Another quote from Keeping House:

The “problem” of housework thus became not just that it was “women’s work” or that it was low-status but that it was widely suspected of not being work at all, even by the men who benefited directly from it and by the women whose lives were consumed by it. The seemingly endless amounts of work actually involved in housework (whose pace and quantity only increased with the introduction of every new laborsaving device), the absence of any help at home, and the lack of any recognition of the value and necessity—or even the reality—of the housewife’s work surely went a long way toward fueling the fires of feminist theorizing about housework. For many feminists, the “housewife” embodied the very antithesis of the self-actualized human being. Germaine Greer, in The Female Eunuch, characterized the life of the full-time housewife as one of absolute servitude. Housewives, she said, “represent the most oppressed class of life—contracted unpaid workers, for whom slaves is not too melodramatic a description.”

Mrs Peterson's historical sketch is just that, a sketch.   To me this seems like very rich territory.   I certainly am personally not immune to the feeling that housekeeping is less distinguished than, say, intellectual work or work of public usefulness.    This tradition goes back a very long way.   Greeks and Romans had slaves to do the dirty work, so that they could focus on the nobler things, in the intellectual sphere.

Later, Christianity rehabilitated the idea of domestic labor.    It became noble purely because it was service. The Son of Man chose to be born into a humble working home; He worked for His own living, and He washed the feet of His own disciples.

Perhaps it is because we live in a post-Christian society that we have lost that idea of the dignity of productive service? It is not really intuitive, after all.   In some ways it is paradoxical.   It is something that has to be cultivated, and domestic cultivation is the very thing we are short of nowadays. You don't pick it up in school or in the workplace, where functionality and standardization are key values.

At the same time, I think it's very true that there is a deep sense that we are lacking when no one is "at home" -- when no one is taking responsibility for the most fundamental things.   There is still a wistful ideal of the well kept, nurturing home.   Even if no one really wants to be the one doing it.

I personally think a well kept home needs the involvement of both man and woman. It's not just a girl thing.   Indeed, it's probably a family, shared responsibility. There is more to it than who ends up doing a given chore. It is more that, it seems to me, that it is ultimately a communal enterprise and one reason that resentment simmers is that people are trying to hand it off to other people rather than pick up their share.

However, it does seem that women are more likely to feel personally responsible for the state of the home.   I'm not sure why that is, but would be interested in any thoughts on the topic I don't think it's JUST cultural.

Please follow your own rabbit trails here, or consider these questions:

Have you read anything else recently that seems to tie into this topic of the mixed feelings towards keeping house?
Why do you think it seems to be more of a woman's issue than a man's? Do you think that husbands/fathers have a part to play in making a home, too?
What was your own background with regard to keeping house and its importance? How do you think that affects what you do nowadays?
Any favorite quotes from the chapter (or from elsewhere related to this topic?)

Next week is the second part of Chapter 1, from the beginning of "Divine Domesticity" to the end of the chapter.

Odds and Ends Sunday

2011-11-13T00:30:00.000-08:00

This will be a random post of bits and pieces since I don't have a regular post for today.

1.

First, please please keep praying for young Matt Wise. He and his family are going through a very difficult ordeal with his ARDS.   Aidan had a bout with this disease as a young infant (it was caused by fluid overload from blood products during his liver failure) but it was not as severe as Matt's.   As with Aidan, I think the continued prayers for Matt are crucial.

2.

Also, while you are praying, will you pray for Michael Summerville and his family? His mommy and aunt are long-distance friends of mine and they are brave, loving people who can use those prayers.   I think anniversaries and holidays are particularly difficult.

3.

And one more prayer request.. for my son Sean, presently living in Oregon with his brothers for his senior year of high school.   His foot was injured during football practice and we are currently facing some decisions about whether surgery is needed or not.

4.

I have been reading around the blogosphere that Google Reader no longer allows you to share favorite posts.   I have been asked how I am still able to share favorite posts and so I will mention this free app called Mobile RSS.   It is compatible with IPhone, ITouch and IPad and requires iOS3 or later.    Because I really almost NEED the share feature to keep track of favorite posts from other blogs, I am really really hoping this won't go away.    I am missing the shared posts of others, though. Sigh.   Another thing I like about Mobile RSS is that it lets you clip blog posts over to Evernote. It's really quite a good app, and FREE!

5

Now I'm going to link to a few from Take Up and Read, the blog my friend Chari and I recently started.
First, I posted a few Disney vacation pictures over there.

6

Also, Chari posted about her November tradition of a Thankfulness Tree. Fun idea and the way she does it, guests get to join in, which seems even more fun.

7.

I wrote this post, Together for a Reason, in response to Elizabeth's great post What I'm Never Going to Tell You.   I was going to post it here, but Chari and I agreed it was better over there.   As older moms who have homeschooled for many years, we have seen enough to know that there are no absolute guarantees, and in fact, to think that Homeschooling the Right Way = Practically Perfect Kids is sort of missing the point of the real strengths of homeschooling.    Homeschooling is still good and worth doing, but not for that reason.

8

If you have a Kindle, and are doing NaNoWriMo this month, this might be of interest: There are presently a few How-To typing writing books for free at Amazon. I am just linking to the "free" list (on the right of the page) not to each individual book.

I don't know how long they will stay free. I also don't personally know if any of them are good or not.   I just downloaded them in the hopes that I might be able to use bits of them with Kieron.   He has asked me to sort of do an ongoing Writing Practicum with him since he's a social learner and it helps him get enthused about the story he is working on.

God cares for the sparrow and the homeschooler

2011-11-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine is having some tough times financially, as so many of us are nowadays. Her faith remains strong, however, and she tells me that she is newly amazed at how God really does provide, sometimes in the last minute and in the most unexpected ways.   In those times you often see His hand clearly, in a way that simply is impossible when you have set things up so that you are safe and comfortable no matter what.

I've noticed that too, in the past.    But it's so easy to forget as soon as the times get easier. My immediate reaction is to start surrounding myself with security -- not just what I need for that day or that moment, but trying to generate the equivalent of "passive income" in the form of continued security for the future.   In a similar way, the Israelites would have stored surplus manna, if they could have. But God in His love wouldn't let them, knowing that if they could do that, they would start counting on the manna and their storehouses, rather than on Him.

This isn't meant to be a recommendation to give away all your money and set out into the wilderness to follow Him, though people who choose this option have chosen the more perfect way, and God really does provide for them, just as He provides for the sparrow and the lily.

Rather, I am just thinking that this applies to homeschooling, too, and a problem I've noticed with my approach that I want to remember.

When something "works" or I hear about a good idea that has 'worked' for someone else, I tend to try to acquire it and then hold on to it, by embedding it into some system or daily routine.    Now it's not that systems or schedules are bad, any more than providing for one's family is bad; rather, that I have to be careful that I don't start focusing on the thing itself and placing my hope in my beautiful schedule or my great array of homeschooling things to have and do.

It was a little different when I had a baby in the house, because babies tend to have the very positive effect of throwing a creative and lively spin on the "best laid plans". But now that I have school-agers, I have to look for other ways to introduce this providential element, things other than our impulses and whims, of course.

Perhaps Charlotte Mason encouraged frequent forays into Nature because nature really is one place where I (or the generic teacher) am obviously not in control.   Perhaps that is one reason I have a hard time getting around to going outdoors with my kids, because in those situations, we are fellow learners; we are all opening ourselves for an adventure, something unknown and mysterious.   The kids are better at that than I am, because daily life is that kind of adventure to them, the more so the younger they are.

I think one of the things I like about unschooling is that it can explicitly depend upon this openness, this surrender to what might happen.   I say "can" because sometimes it doesn't; not all unschoolers walk this path, and probably most find it difficult at times. I know it is difficult for me, for instance, to choose that way rather than one that diverges very slightly at first but ends up in a vastly different place -- a kind of carelessness and laxness not far removed from acedia.

But the medievals knew, as we tend to forget nowadays, that busy-ness and constant hurried work are symptoms of that same acedia.   The Israelites, if allowed to store manna, would have been allowed to turn their focus away from that pillar of fire and cloud, that Voice, which after all is hard to encounter without a deep shaking up.   They would have been looking at their provisions of manna, counting it up, figuring out how to get more, relying on it, complaining of its blandness (as they indeed did, even so).

I already mentioned that being open to mystery and wonder is not the same as taking the easy way.    I feel its difference even though I can't put it into words. In a book I read often as a child, Taran Wanderer, one reads of the man Llonio, who with his wife and many children, lives on what the river brings to them. He has a way of taking what is around him and making use of it in very creative ways. It's a quirky way to live, but Taran learns from it as he does from the more traditional craftsmen and women he also meets.   It is very different from laziness and shiftlessness, since it takes account of everything, is grateful for everything, and makes everything useful.

St Francis de Sales often talks about the bee who goes out and takes bitter or common things and turns them into sweetness and nourishment.

I think for me this is more like a habit of thought than anything in particular that I do or don't do.   But I've been trying to wake up every morning and just reserve the checklist until I've thought of the day's shape, its promise, what it will bring, what God wants, what is new, what is old. I'm sorry this sounds so mushy and not very practical, but it results in my checklist being more "felt", more connected to poetic knowledge rather than "what we have to get done today."

Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life -- Mr Linky

2011-11-11T09:43:00.001-08:00

Thanks everyone who commented on Keeping House last Monday.

We were out of town and I couldn't get Mr Linky working for me before we left -- my registration confirmation was going to spam and I couldn't access it from my netbook.

But now I think it's working.I'm putting the widget here to test it and so that IF you left a link to your post last Monday but would still like to enter it in this Mr Linky, you can do so. I would do it myself but I don't want to act for you without your permission : ).

Sorry for the complexity. I think it will be OK from now on!

A Book Post

2011-11-11T07:47:00.001-08:00

My family went to Disney last week! It's the first time we've been there since the older kids were younger than this set is now   That's why I wasn't blogging.   But this post isn't about Disneyland. I am suffering from The Flu That Stayed Too Long, the same one that's been attacking me ince early October, and so yesterday I was lying around recuperating.

Since I was taking advantage of my enforced idleness by updating my IPhone's operating system and didn't feel good enough to read any of the heavy books on my bedstand, I checked a couple of books out of the library.

One was called "Fiction Ruined My Family." Great title and nice cover.   The memoir of a youngest daughter of four who grew up with a defeated writer Dad and a onetime child equestrian/debutatnte mom who has become an alcoholic. I didn't finish it. The part when she was a child was rather interesting though cynical but when she got out of high school the book just got grim.   To me, anyway.   I was hoping it would be sort of like one of Anne Lamott's books -- another girl with a writer father who goes on to tell her own story -- but the writing was much less clever   She doesn't have the turn of phrase and insight that Lamott does, at least not yet. She was not getting across a message of real humanity under the dysfunction of her family as Lamott does At least, it wasn't working for me.

The other book was called The Rules of "Normal" Eating: A Commonsense Approach for Dieters, Overeaters, Undereaters, Emotional Eaters and Everyone Else in Between . Another food book! I checked it out from the library because (1) it was immediately available and (2) I was curious about "Normal".

Anyway, this turns out to be quite a helpful book!

For one thing it made me realize rather sadly that I don't really have many food/eating/weight issues anymore She wrote out lots of lists of irrational beliefs and feelings in regard to food issues and I saw ones that I used to have but hardly any that I still really feel. I am just one of those middle aged people that can't rely on my metabolism like I used to.   But basically I am what she calls "normal" in quotations because of course, there is no one "normal" -- there's a range.

It's slightly sad because those issues were a significant part of my life for so long that I miss them.

On the other hand, I should be proud because I've spent so many years working on changing and apparently, I've accomplished the bulk of it.    I guess that shows that you really can change over time. As the book points out, it's not a fast process most of the time and probably for good reasons. If you could change yourself right away, you would lose stability.

So I didn't feel like I needed the eating advice so much anymore, but as an introduction to 21st century operative theories of habit forming, this book is quite accessible and clear, at least so I found it.   I noticed several times that her method for working on Beliefs/Feelings/Behavior is not too different from Charlotte Mason's.   So the book, or another like it, would probably be useful for someone trying to get a better grasp of what habit is and how to change habits.

This author pictures Beliefs, Feelings, and Behavior forming a triangle. Beliefs influence feelings and behavior, Feelings influence beliefs and behavior, Behavior can influence beliefs and feelings.     She points out that when we have a strong feeling, a belief is often tied to it. If I'm enraged by some bad driver on the road, it's because I have a belief that bad driving is an intolerable insult. Then I may do something as a result, like drive too close or shake my fist or swear at the driver.   Feelings can also affect beliefs and behavior.   If I'm already high on adrenalin and rage after the traffic experience, I might think some incidental thing at the workplace is way more important than I would have if I had come to work in a happy mood

The book points out that we can modify these influences -- we don't have to just react.   Engrained habits are difficult to break -- if I always head for the donuts to calm down when I'm in a rage, I will feel that pull to the donut tray, but if I replace that habit with another one, like some stretching exercises, a new track will start forming.   Eventually if I persist this track will be deeper than the old donut one.

Feelings are just inner sensations like our outer senses. They are meant to make us aware of what we should seek and avoid, and they also increase our awareness and understanding in general, just as our outer senses help guide us to learn and stay safe in doing so.

Behavior is what results from our feelings and beliefs.   Behaviors never come out of nowhere.    They can be traced back to our feelings and our perceptions of what they signify, our beliefs.

I think Beliefs (as the author calls them) are the strongest influences, since they have a way of justifying our feelings and behaviors.    Especially, she says, "core" beliefs can affect our working beliefs. So if you have a belief that you are basically unworthy, you might end up with a working belief that you don't deserve good food, or that your body isn't worth taking care of.

When she talks about "beliefs" there is some ambiguity because of course, "belief" can mean lots of things. But I think she is talking about them as "operative assumptions" rather than doctrines or statements of Faith. They are the messages we grow up with. Often our parents are our deepest influence, but there are other influences too, including our own temperaments.     I don't think it's quite the same thing as our "will" but perhaps it is the content that forms our wills.

Everyone has "beliefs" in this sense, including materialists and rationalists who don't have any religious faith   They can be irrational (distorted) or rational (informed by reality).    They often go way deeper than our cognitive processes and in fact almost shape our thinking in some ways, providing a "framework" for perception.   Charlotte Mason talks about this a bit in her work on the insufficiency of formal reasoning

The author says that it's important to keep examining our "beliefs" especially when they seem to be affecting our behavior in ways that we don't like.    For example, if I have an engrained notion that I MUST clean my plate or I will be wasteful, and wastefulness is bad, then it may be good to "reframe" that belief.   Perhaps I can realize that it's just as wasteful to eat food in excess of what is good for me. Then I may adjust my behavior -- choose smaller servings, plan to eat only half of what's on my plate at the restaurant and save the rest for later, or whatever.

The author says that you can usually tell nonfunctional beliefs by their rigidity and negativity, by their "all or nothing" approach and by the way they trigger panic and shame. Related to this is mental "chatter" which are those voices you hear in your head that send you negative, scolding, often ridiculous messages that are still very powerful.

Basically, she makes a case for informed intuition. Most people tend to shut away their perceptions, their inner sense of what is good or not good.    So they eat and do other things according to rigid rules that aren't in accordance with reality. Rules aren't bad in themselves. But some kinds of rules are ineffective because they try to override where they shouldn't

There is way more. As with most books of this kind, there is nothing professedly Christian, but the advice tends to implicitly cover ground already broken by Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, and other past thinkers with an interest in human psychology. Buddhism is invoked as a kind of doctrinally neutral self-optimization wisdom, but not as frequently as in many self-help books.

The author also mentions the work on Rational/Irrational beliefs done by Albert Ellis.    Someone called Maxie Maultsby formulated a system for reflecting on and reframing faulty beliefs For some reason, after reading The Abolition of Man and The Grand Design, I have been sort of skeptical of anything called "rational".    This term seems to be itself a cloaking device for another set of assumptions.   But with that reservation, I think it can be helpful in living an "examined life".   The set of assumptions need to be thought through, and this is something the author recommends -- thinking through and tailoring for oneself, since a key trap for distorted thinkers is following someone else's "system" without thinking it through, and expecting some kind of magical result. It seems to be a peculiarity of our free will (this is me talking) that it has to be home-made, a matter of relationship, not "mere" rules.   We don't seem to be able to just lift "what works" from someone else's life -- the results will be different   That doesn't mean we don't learn from each other, but there's a difference from learning and just sort of accepting.

I suppose we all accept many, many things because I've found it's mentally exhausting to work through EverySinglePremise in my life, at least, but when something isn't working, again and again, it may be time to think of changing.    She makes the point that Discomfort + Awareness = Change. In other words, you may be uncomfortable, but until you become aware of your discomfort and have the ability to do something about it, change probably won't happen. She uses an exercise to show this. Are you sitting comfortably right now? Perhaps if you were watching a gripping movie, you might not notice your arm was going to sleep. But if something made you aware, you might try to shift your position to get more comfortable.

Long, rambling post, sorry! After I've been away from blogging for a while, I have trouble getting back into the swing of it.

I also finished reading Quo Vadis, but this is already too long to talk about that.   I liked it, though.

Keeping House Litany -- Preface

2011-11-07T02:30:00.000-08:00

She watches over the affairs of her household -- Proverbs 31:27

Keeping house can be a very mundane activity. It is certainly repetitive, and the kinds of work that it involves are varied enough that few people enjoy all of them equally. But at the very same time, housekeeping is about practicing sacred disciplines and creating sacred space, for the sake of Christ as we encounter him in our fellow household members and in neighbors, strangers, and guests. -- Margaret Kim Peterson

In this preface, Margaret Kim Peterson tells about three experiences she had that led to the writing of this book.

1. Talking to two friends who worked full time outside the home and finding that they had a deep longing to keep house, to have time and margin to do household tasks without trying to fit them into the corners of a busy life.   That made her realize that the desire for a well kept house and time to nurture one's home and family ran deep in at least some women.

2.   Going to a party where she (the author) found that people were astonished and somewhat disapproving that she "just" kept house and only worked part time, even though she didn't have children.   That made her realize how discredited housekeeping had become in our modern age.

3. Being able to help a friend who gave birth to a child very disabled with Down Syndrome, who eventually died.   Since her schedule wasn't as hopelessly crammed as that of most people around her, she was able to bring meals, help her friend get the basics done, and just be there for her and her baby daughter. That made her realize that "keeping house" extends beyond the boundaries of the home and into the community; it incorporates hospitality and kindness to friends and neighbors.

Because of these experiences, she started wondering whether the Bible had anything to say about keeping house, and her research and thinking resulted in the book.

While reading I started thinking about what experiences of my own made me interested in reading this book in the first place. Unlike the author, I don't really naturally enjoy housekeeping -- I like it sometimes, but at other times I find it a burden.     And I don't necessarily feel like it's enough to keep me busy, at least not when I don't have babies or lesson plans to occupy my time as well.

I think I have a hard time with household duties because they are menial and don't pay.    My default way of thinking is that it is a lot of work with very little tangible return. It is repetitious and it has to be done again and again.

But when she mentioned that she had studied Scripture and history to find out what it had to say about housework, it pulled me in because it showed she wasn't going to just take for granted that housekeeping was proper women's work -- she was going to dig in and make a case for its dignity and value.

And I know my attitude towards keeping house is not quite right, so I read the book hoping it would help me see things in a better light.

And when she said that she doesn't thinking of cleaning as synonymous with housekeeping -- that to her, keeping house has more to do with providing a home for her loved ones than having a spotless chandelier or whatever, that opened up a new perspective to me. I always thought housekeeping was basically house cleaning, but here she was saying that keeping house was like being the lady of the household, not so much the scullery maid that has all the dirtiest jobs to do. That made me think. Is there something to "keeping house" that's not necessarily identical to just being an immaculate house-cleaner? Maybe there's hope after all ;-).

Finally, I'm blogging about it because I've found that blogging about my housework helps me think about it more positively.   In fact, most of the most substantial improvements I've made in the house have come about because I've blogged through it.   Seems that writing and taking pictures gives me that tangible feedback and sense of accomplishment that I usually don't experience.

Discussion (optional -- use if you like or just follow your own rabbit trail, by commenting or a link to your blog post)

What about you? If you've read the book, why did you pick it up?
Have past experiences of yours affected how you look at "keeping house"?
What do you hope to get out of the book during this reading?
What kind of thing do you hope to change about how you do things now?

As for me, I'm hoping to upgrade my kitchen skills -- I'm in a cooking rut recently.
I also hope to be more proactive about hospitality. Something I'm praying about.

I'd love to hear any thoughts or comments.

Thinking about Motivation and Teenagers

2011-11-05T02:30:00.000-07:00

But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. Psalm 1

Interesting article posted on Unschooling Catholics -- Teens Respond to Pleasure, Not Pain.

Thus telling a 13 year old that he will fail a test tomorrow if he doesn't study isn't that effective in inducing willing compliance. He knows that. But risk avoidance is not emotionally motivating. And that video game sure is.

Reminding a 13 year old how good it feels to accomplish something, how happy he'll be when he does well, and how much more time he will have to play if he studies efficiently works a lot better. Those POSITIVE emotions activate their incentive processing center.

It's easy to over-extend conclusions from limited studies, of course, but in this case the study seems to shed some light on my everyday experience. It also speaks to some of my questions about diligence as delight and St Jerome translating the passage as "His will (voluntas) is in the Law of the Lord". Voluntas, then, becomes related to delight rather than what we usually think of as willpower, which usually implies forcing ourselves to do something we would much prefer not to.

And I like that idea of trying to work towards a positive goal rather than remind the student of the negative consequences. I can see that temperaments differ here and that some kids thrive on a bit more challenge and even conflict, but my present teenager likes to stay happy and be in tune with the world.

St Therese wrote to her sister

‘No word of reproach touched touched me as much as did one of your caresses. My nature was such that fear made me recoil; with love not only did I advance, I actually flew.’

I remember a few years ago, a friend discussed unschooling with me. She said she didn't think it would work, because the kids wouldn't do math and things like that if they weren't made to.   At the time, though, my daughter was working her way through an algebra book, and learning German, and studying Shakespeare, all because she wanted to.   She wasn't particularly thrilled with the algebra, but she knew she wanted to go to a Catholic liberal arts college and that to do that she would need to know some math.

This study seems to help with the distinction between that "have to" and "want to".   Maybe someone could have said that my daughter was studying algebra because she had to, not because she really loved algebra. But the point was that no one was standing over her; she knew her goals and what it would take to get there.

Rather than moving away from something, she was moving towards something.... her future, as the person God wanted her to be. So she did want to do algebra, and she even wanted to love it, because she knew it was a worthwhile subject and would help her develop as a human being, a thinker, not just advance her career goals.

This year, discussing things with my 15 year old, I've found that he usually wants to do things nobly. So knowing that, I can try to support him through the harder parts, or else help him find a way to make them easier.

St Thomas Aquinas divides emotions up into those two basic categories -- the kind that draw you toward something (love, hope) and the kind that move you away from something (fear, aversion).   All things considered, it's better to do things for love rather than out of fear. Fear serves a useful purpose, and is indispensable in our human condition just like pain.   But as Chesterton said:

....this advantage the mystic morality must always have --it is always jollier. A young man may keep himself from vice by continually thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually thinking of the Virgin Mary. There may be question about which method is the more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. But surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome.

Though the context is different, the principle applies, I think. Dwelling on large, grand, positive things helps enlarge a teen's spirit as well as helping him do what he should do. It may not be possible to always do it this way, but perhaps it is more possible than it sometimes seems, especially since along with their love of pleasure, teens usually are quite idealistic and get pleasure from doing the right thing.

Slow Homeschooling?

2011-11-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

I started writing this on Friday afternoon, after a week of homeschooling. At the time I was experiencing a slightly jaded feeling I recognize. It happens every year sooner or later.   It doesn't matter HOW I'm homeschooling that year.   However I start, I always feel enthusiastic and competent for X amount of time. Then we get to the end of the week and I realize the inspiration is trickling away.

I've homeschooled long enough to know that inspiration isn't everything.   With everything important --- your faith, your marriage, your writing, your art or music, your marathon, your studies, your medical treatment -- you get to the ebb tide, the restless or stalled times when what you are doing seems torturous and burdensome.   Or there are those other times, when it's worse than drudgery; when what you've done so far seems to mock you, because you realize you aren't coming even close to what you envisioned.

Does that mean it was all worthless? One learns that the answer is no.   You keep at it, and you end up with something not quite what you hoped and dreamed, but something solid.

Still, I've learned with the practice of my Faith that though inspiration and feelings are by no means essential to true devotion to God, still, it doesn't do to just pretend they are unimportant. I can accept deprivations from God because I know He has a purpose, but it seems like a sort of dishonesty to pretend they are trivial.   They hurt.

Also, desolations (in spiritual terms) or a fume of burnout smoke (in homeschooling terms) can be a symptom of something that is not quite right.    It's like pain when exercising. There is "good pain" that means you are growing and that "bad pain" you shouldn't ignore, or you store up more trouble for yourself in the future.   It can help you realize that something has gone off track, so that you don't keep going further and further off.

But that isn't what I was going to talk about, not exactly.

Rather, I was thinking about the art of slow reading. I started thinking about it after I confessed I had read 153 books in 9 months. That's a lot of books.   I like fast reading.    It's my speed of choice. But I thought I should try to slow down, so I was collecting links on slow reading. Here's a few:

Slow reading: the affirmation of authorial intent
(Who would have thought that slow reading could provide an antidote to deconstructionism?)

The art of slow reading
(Is internet skimming hurting our brains? Probably. )

Going back further in time:

Lectio Divina

and in the old days, before the printing press, school was mostly Lectio --basically reading from great authors -- and memorizing, reflecting upon and learning how to understand what the readings were about.

This still isn't really what I was going to talk about.

Thinking over WHY I feel sort of restless, beyond that it was a bad food week, I have a cold, and the days are getting shorter -- I realize that I always get to a point where I feel like what I am doing isn't enough. We are proceeding, but slowly.   There is more that COULD be squeezed into the day.

This is the state of mind that I cultivate some unschooliness to combat, because I know it's a deception. Quantity isn't of first importance. My homeschool is not a factory. I know that, because some of our most idiosyncratic, quirkily paced years actually turned out to be some of our richest.   In retrospect, which makes it harder, because it didn't always show up at the time.

In trying to think this through, I started thinking:   If there is something called Slow Reading, and it's a Good Thing, could there be something called Slow Homeschooling?

Certainly, slowness is a vanishing quality in our world; everything else conspires to hurry us along.   It's hard to even muster a case for it, but when "slowness" is celebrated nowadays, as in Slow Reading or Slow Food, or Slow Language, it is talked about in terms of individuality, and reflectiveness, and focus.   Those are good things.

In that case I should probably keep trying to do what I think is important and not let that inevitable flat feeling stir me into a hastier speed that will become careless and un-deliberate.

As I write this, I ask myself whether I'm just looking for a way to take it easier than I really should. And sure, that is always a temptation. But I'm trying to pinpoint something different -- a habit of waiting, thinking things through. dwelling on a book, accepting that we don't have to have a giant stack of accomplishments in order to be successful.

The purpose of the teaching of slow reading is toallow us to enter into conversations with the authors of great works -- thoseauthors whose distinction is that they afford us the opportunity to thinkthings that are worthy of thought.

The teaching of slow reading, therefore, is an experimentthat aims beyond itself. In itself the practice of slow reading intends tocreate occasions for joining in conversations with (not just about) some of themost powerful thinkers who have ever lived -- not merely to learn what theythought, but to think with them and learn from them. But the aim of slowreading beyond itself is to consider whether the practice of slow reading mightfoster the recovery of a certain art of conversation: that in which listeningholds at least an equal place with speaking.

Since homeschooling is so intrinsically connected with reading, listening, conversing and thinking, then surely some of what Lancelot Fletcher says about slow reading also applies to my pace of homeschooling.Charlotte Mason says (about preschoolers, but surely the need doesn't disappear at the same time as that first front tooth is lost)

“In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time.”

Part of this, it seems to me, is not to rush through our school times; to give them a chance to be suspended in time, Or as a Montessori article puts it:

The Greeks had a name for it-Kairos-- a quality of time without measure. We all know it. The artist and writer know it. We are baffled by it when we ask, "Where did the time go!" after we lose ourselves in a book or in a labor of love. Kairos time returns us to the young child's time without measure, where freedom of movement and freedom of choice-the time-honored icons of Montessori theory-are not hampered by artificial blocks of time, as in traditional school environments.

I really want my kids to have that sense of freedom from time in our homeschool. I really admire homeschoolers who are always busy driving their kids to activities or doing multiple clever, energetic things in their homeschools, but I can also see that some pauses and spaces can be a positive thing, too, even if in a less obvious way.

A couple of related posts I found at other blogs:

Slow Homeschooling from God Made, Home Grown
The ultimate burnout survival guide, from Conversion Diary

Abolition of Man: The Way, part 2

2011-11-03T03:24:00.000-07:00

Continuing the book discussion of Abolition of Man with part 2 of chapter 2: The Way

Does this mean, then, that no progress in ourperceptions of value can ever take place? That we are bound down forever to an unchanging code given once for all? And is it, in anyevent, possible to talk of obeying what I call the Tao? If welump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of East andWest, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find manycontradictions and some absurdities? I admit all this. Some criticism,some removal of contradictions, even some real development, isrequired. But there are two very different kinds of criticism.

I'm glad that CS Lewis brought this up because I had started to puzzle a little about whether you could talk about a "Tao" or "Way" in any meaningful sense. Was it just a cover label for "whatever moral system a given culture happened to have?" In that case, wouldn't it be a variable, that could mean vastly different things in different contexts, even opposing things?

Just by chance I have been reading Christian Reflections (a collection of essays by Lewis compiled by Walter Hooper after Lewis' death) and his essay On Ethics covers a lot of the same territory as this chapter in Abolition of Man. The essay isn't available online but I did find a paper that discusses On Ethics alongside of Abolition of Man from a Reformed perspective Transcendent Natural Law in CS Lewis (pdf)

In On Ethics, Lewis makes the point that most civilizations or rather, most moral systems, overlap to quite a degree on their understanding of ethics. Where they differ, it is usually in extension or limitation of the basic principle. For example, some moral frameworks limit "do not kill" or "treat others as you would be treated" to the person's own clan or people, while others extend it outwards. And so on.

When Christianity came into being, for example, it wasn't revolutionary in its ethics. There were a few extensions and changes in emphasis. But the radical nature of the Christian message wasn't so much in its understanding of moral norms, as in the new covenant and the new hope that this involved.

Lewis doesn't base his case on the overlaps. So in that way his "Tao" is a variable. It stands for something that all cultures have had -- that he would argue no one can do without if they are ever going to recommend anything as a "should". But it also happens to be the case that most venerable cultures have a lot of overlap in the details of their ethical code (there is more about that in the Appendix of the book, which we haven't gotten to yet).

Lewis makes the point in On Ethics that he does in this chapter, that we can't critique the Tao, the code of ethics, from outside it. This is because there is no way to get to a moral imperative, a "should", unless you have already started with a "should" of some sort. I like the way he puts this:

A theorist about language may approach his nativetongue, as it were from outside, regarding its genius as a thing thathas no claim on him and advocating wholesale alterations of its idiomand spelling in the interests of commercial convenience or scientificaccuracy. That is one thing. A great poet, who has 'loved, and beenwell nurtured in, his mother tongue', may also make great alterationsin it, but his changes of the language are made in the spirit of thelanguage itself: he works from within. The language which suffers, hasalso inspired the changes. That is a different thing—asdifferent as the works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It isthe difference between alteration from within and alteration fromwithout: between the organic and the surgical.

In On Ethics he hits harder on the logical impossibility of choosing a system of ethics from outside a system. If you have not started with some type of ethical framework, you can't develop one.

The way I understand it, this is mainly because you can't get an imperative from the indicative mood; you can't get a prescriptive from a descriptive; you can't make "is" add up to "ought". Apparently, it's a fallacy: Is-Ought Problem I also remember reading about this fallacy on Drew Campbell's old blog (I quoted it here but you have to scroll down to near the end of the post). There has to be some value scale linking the "is" to the "ought" -- one thing has to actually be considered "better" than the other, so that it is to be desired and sought. For example, something like "Look out for Number One" adds up to "self-preservation and happiness are good things" even if in a narrow, impoverished way compared to the richness and reason of the traditional Tao. But "self-preservation and personal happiness are good things" is an assumption.

Lewis puts it this way:

From propositions about fact alone nopractical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preservesociety cannot lead to do this except by the mediation ofsociety ought to be preserved. This will cost you your lifecannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it onlythrough a felt desire or an acknowledged duty ofself-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in theimperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though hecontinues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing isimpossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to includewhat our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgementssuch as society ought to be preserved (though they can supportthemselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) arenot mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must giveup at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational'value behind all the sentiments we have debunked.

Lewis says that all civilizations, all workable moral systems, start with a pre-existing Ought, a code of ethics generally held if not generally followed to perfection. Within that Ought, you can develop further by contraction or expansion. Thus Jesus could say, "Moses told you this... but I tell you now...." and develop and fulfill the understanding of the Law. But not by destroying the Law; by fulfilling it. Lewis says the revolutionary has to work from within.

I thought that was interesting aside from the point he is making about morality. It seems to apply to a lot of things, from literature (the example he gives above) to philosophy to faith ("I believe in order to understand") and even to the way a mother can be a good teacher without special credentials, because she knows and loves her children. You can coherently work from inside, and in fact you must. A scientist can do fine work within his own discipline. The problem comes when he thinks his discipline can sustain itself by itself; that it is a closed system.

Lewis says that a crank or ideologue is distinguished from a wise man in taking one bit of the Tao and making it supersede everything else. Whereas a wise man can put the better above the worse, the higher above the lower, and find unity in multiplicity, the crank distorts the ethical framework.

In On Ethics, Lewis writes:

I deny that we have any choice to make between clearly differentiated ethical systems. I deny that we have any power to make a new ethical system. I assert that wherever and whenever ethical discussion begins we find already before us an ethical code whose validity has to be assumed before we can even criticize it. For no ethical attack on any of the traditional precepts can be made except on the ground of some other traditional precept.

So the bottom line is that when someone is debunking moral values, it is inevitably from a moral framework, even if the debunker does not realize it or does not acknowledge his framework. If you trace it backwards you often find that the debunker has chosen some particular favorite value and hyperfocused at the expense of the others. I already mentioned the Look out for Number One, where the perpetrator is hyperfocusing on personal good. He ends up defeating his own narrow purpose, of course; Aristotle deals with that quite thoroughly in the Nichomachean Ethics. In Lewis science fiction book Out of the Silent Planet, as quoted in the article I linked to above, the Oyarsa of Malacandra says to Weston, who wants men to colonize and plunder the planets and the stars:

I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent until it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you can give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey.

You can see this with a lot of the moral debates that go on nowadays in the public square. One moral imperative is pushed at the expense of all others, and with no agreed-on grounds for the framework.

It seems to me that one of the hardest things to teach our children is to be wise -- to be able to balance out and prioritize different values without letting one of them get a stranglehold on all the others. Literature, it seems to me, helps develop this moral sense because it lets the child (or adult) participate in moral decisions and their consequences. It helps the child work from within the body of ethical thought. It adds another, thoughtful dimension to the instructions and training in his home and school and church. It's hard to make an ideologue or a crank out of someone who has read widely and imaginatively, because cranks and ideologues have a narrow focus and a reader has a wider and broader outlook.

As Charlotte Mason said, quoting the Psalm, the task is to set the child's feet " in a wide room" (or a spacious place). Literature allows the child this room to think and imaginatively experience within the terms of the moral framework. To me literature seems particularly important nowadays when we are less dependent on nature -- the seasons, the weather, the ground we live on -- to survive and thrive.

It's possible nowadays for people to go through life without any of the tempering you get from living on the land and from folk stories and literature; it's unfortunate that our schools, with their artificial lighting and heating and their emphasis on second-hand information, not to mention the unfair power wielded by the lowest common denominator of the peer group, only perpetrate this problem, so that if a child learns wisdom in the school environment it is accidentally or negatively, not because the setting is geared to support it.

Keeping House Book Study

2011-11-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

I was going to start blogging about Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life. That was back in July. Then July came, and the summer had turned into a gypsy procession, as various combinations of members of our family traversed south and north and east and even west (in the form of a trip to Alaska). I almost stopped blogging altogether, and I hardly was even reading anything that didn't have a narrative.

In early September I actually did give the house a full autumn cleaning, but I was too busy doing it to write about it.

But now it's ~~late October~~ early November! and it might be good to think of starting to get the house ready for Advent and Christmas. The clean look is wearing off now that books and paper have found semi-permanent residence on many surfaces, and the leftovers of various projects are everywhere I look. So I thought I might pick up Keeping House again and blog my way through it.

When I was at Bible Study tonight I was thinking about how much more I retain of the things I studied along with others, than I do when I read something on my own. It goes like this:

Read quickly through it on my own = a general sense of what the book was about plus a few details.
Read through and blog through it = all the above plus some actual thoughts in my head that came out of what I read.
Read though and discuss it with others = tackling some real gaps in understanding that I hadn't even noticed + getting insights from others + some actual changes in my life and thinking, whether big or small.

I think this is why narrating is better than just reading and narrating AND follow-up is better than just narrating.

Here is the Schedule

November 7 Preface
November 14 Chapter 1 - What’s Christian About Housework?

November 21 Chapter 1 part 2
November 28 Chapter 2 - A Place to Live
December 5 Chapter 3 - Sheltering a Household
December 12 Chapter 4 - Clothes to Wear
December 19, Chapter 5 -- Clothing a Household

--Break for Christmas --

January 9 Chapter 6 - Food to Eat
January 16 Chapter 7 - Feeding a Household

January 23 Chapter 8 - The Well-Kept House
January 30 Optional Wrap Up or Catch Up

Even starting now takes me through January --- yikes. I needed that reminder that Christmas is not really that far away!

Please leave a comment if you are interested in blogging along, so I know whether it's worth it to put up a Linky widget. (It's not a commitment, of course, if life gets in the way and you end up not being able to do it).

Take Up and Read

2011-11-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Chari and I have started a new blog! We've been talking about it for a long time, for over a year in fact, and after many discussions and much strategizing finally went ahead and did it. For people who think in binary, and I know you are out there, today's date is 11-01-11. But that is not why we chose today to open the blog. Rather, we planned it for the beautiful Solemnity of All Saints.

Take Up and Read

We're just getting started, but I hope you get a chance to visit us over there, now and in the coming days and weeks!

God our Father, source of all holiness,
the work of your hands is manifest in your saints,
the beauty of your truth is reflected in their faith.
May we who aspire to have part in their joy
be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives,
so that having shared their faith on earth
we may also know their peace in your kingdom.
Grant this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Mostly about Books

2011-10-31T14:30:00.000-07:00

I am slowly reading a book called Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge For?

I got the book simply because of its title, and am glad I did, though I didn't really know anything about it before I bought it.

Yesterday I went looking for information about the author, Mary Midgley, and found this profile. Also some more articles by her.

She is an interesting person -- a British Senior Lecturer on Philosophy, educated at Oxford, a good friend of Iris Murdoch. Midgley published her first book when in her fifties. She said about this:

"I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didnÍt know what I thought before then; if I had been an academic I would have had to publish, whether I knew what I thought or not. The idea that in philosophy or English you can have 16 new ideas a year is ridiculous."

She is an atheist or at least an agnostic, but writes sympathetically about the role of religion and often acerbically about scienticism and academic philosophizing:

....she staked out a territory all of her own, examining how science comes to function as a substitute for religion, and how very badly it does the job. It is entirely characteristic that her latest book, Science And Poetry takes its epigraph from Richard Dawkins, "Science is the only way we have of understanding the real world", and proceeds to dance all over this apparently reasonable statement. It's not that she considers science a bad way of knowing the real world. But it is only one among many, and one which must be kept in firmly its place.

When I was searching for articles about her I found several rather shrill hostile ones by atheists whose names you would probably recognize. Here's a post in defense of her that I thought was interesting.

Other books I am trying to read through right now in bits and pieces:

Miracles and Physics (I finished it, but I didn't really understand it very well, so I'm trying to read it again).
In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity by Josef Pieper
Guide to Thomas Aquinas by Josef Pieper
The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions and Methods by AG Sertillanges (a reread)
Christian Reflections by CS Lewis

also I haven't given up on Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life and hope to start blogging about it soon.

The Grand Design

2011-10-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

Now that I've read Stephen Hawking's and Leonard Mlodinow's book The Grand Design, thanks to my library's Kindle lending program, I want to write out some thoughts. I blogged about it before I read it, back when it first came out. This isn't really a review but just about some issues the book brought up in my mind, that seem to want to keep spinning around in there until I write them out.

So here goes ---

Sean Carroll, another physicist and author, writes in a review of the book:

The Hawking vs. God debate has featured prominently in the news of late. He and Mr. Mlodinow don't claim to have proved that God doesn't exist; their argument is somewhat more confined, but still important in its implications. We understand enough about the ultimate laws of physics, the authors say, to conclude that we don't need God to understand the universe.

Or, as the book says,

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does nature have the laws it does? Why do we exist? Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. . . . We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."

Father Stanley Jaki, a physicist and theologian who wrote many books about the relation of science and religion, has written that physicists, if they are not careful,can confuse the operational with the ontological.

The way I understand what he is saying, good physics does not add up to good philosophy or good theology. When you have explained the steps by which you think the universe has begun, even supposing your model meets all the standards of a good model, you have perhaps accomplished a wonderful feat of theoretical reverse engineering, but you have not even started to say anything about metaphysics (which is the study of things beyond matter and motion).   You are still in your own field.

Also, at the very least, the epistemological presuppositions upon which physical science is founded are metaphysical.   We have to presuppose that we can say something meaningful about the physical world before we can even start writing a book of this sort. And that is a giant metaphysical presupposition.    It can't be verified physically.

It's important to get that out on the table at the start, I think.   I am not sure whether Hawking and Mlodinow would disagree, though I suspect that they would, and that is one of the ambiguous elements in the book.   I definitely think they intended to fire a shot over the bow of traditional metaphysics, but in spite of their provocative "Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead," I don't think they have managed to fly their flag on the mast yet.

As far as physics go, Hawking and Mlodinow posit an "M-theory" which I will have to simplify even more than they already did in the book, in order to fit it in this post.   They hold that any universe that can exist, will exist; that

the universe does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously in what is called a quantum superposition.

So, given this theory, what looks like extraordinary odds that our universe should be as it is, habitable and capable of producing beings like ourselves (I believe they give a number of 10 to the 500th power for all possible permutations of the basic physical laws, which is a number beyond staggering), is actually not a highly improbable thing at all but demonstrably inevitable for this universe. The very fact that it does exist means that it could.

The conclusions that they draw from this, if it were true, are:

We are not special -- sentient human beings are the inevitable byproduct of the particular set of laws that exist in this particular universe.
God did not custom-design our universe -- it's just one of a vastly, mind-boggingly number of alternate universes.

The only way I can make these conclusions follow the premise is by including an assumption that sheer quantity has any kind of relationship to qualitative importance. Such an assumption certainly isn't a given, and I think it would be somewhat difficult to defend.

To prepare the ground for their multiverse theory, Hawking and Mlodinow explain their philosophy of model-dependent realism. They say that it is meant to short-circuit the philosophical debate between what the book calls "realists" and "anti-realists".

"There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science."

"According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation ... then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."

As I understand it, this approach allows them to speculate a bit past the normal grounds of our physical universe, while still staying within bounds of natural science.

I sort of like this concept of model-dependent realism because as they say in the book, it speaks to something we are aware of in ordinary life as well as in science. A lot of times, what we see is dependent on what we have seen and understood in the past. A new baby is awed by the swooping of the mobile above his head, whereas his mother, who has snapped it together and clipped it to the crib and turned it on, is seeing it very differently -- probably looking past the mobile watching the baby with his big eyes and dancing motions.   When Hawking and Mlodinow look at a physics equation they see something very different than I do.   Last year, Kieron read a book called The View from the Oak which was about the sometimes radically different ways different creatures perceive things.   For example, a dog's nose is hundreds of times more sensitive than mine, so he can almost get a 3D representation of something by its smell, where I would be only vaguely aware that there is a smell at all.

Yet it strikes me that we humans do not really practice model-dependent realism even though in some ways we are somewhat subject to it and hopefully, somewhat aware of it. In other words, no one ever REALLY says, "That is just my model of reality" though they might say it to someone else "That is just YOUR model".

All of us, from the baby in the crib to the physicist, are trying to come to some absolute truth from our relative stance in the universe. We hope to transcend our model-dependence at least partly, by taking it into account and attempting to compensate for it, even though we know our attempts can never totally succeed. We may not see a whole truth given our limits (Thomas Aquinas said that a natural philosopher can never totally understand even a fly), so the understanding that our knowledge is limited induces a healthy humility and wonder that induces us to find out more, but we don't rest in our partial perspective.   (A flea or dog, on the other hand, does rest in its limited knowledge, because it doesn't care to KNOW so much as to meet its biological needs).

Even the baby is striving to universalize his initial impression of the world. As soon as he is physically able to get his hands on the toy he has previously only observed, he turns it, tastes it, shakes it, pulls it, throws it. He is not content until he runs out of ways to study its behavior and sensory properties.   Then he turns to something else. And we all do the same thing in our own way.   Hawking and Mlodinow are not really, really content to say "this is our model and we're happy with it." They will want to defend it and refine it. They will want it to be true in some way, though they may be completely and humbly willing to admit it is not the whole truth and some future genius may springboard from their theory to a more explanatory and predictive one.

Plus, though Hawking and Mlodinow want to propose model-dependent realism as a philosophical approach that "short-circuits" the debate between realism and idealism, I don't think it can work this way. It does more and less than short-circuit (their term) -- it simply sidesteps the issue by not confronting it.

Model-dependent realism seems like it must be a form of realism -- by using the example of a goldfish bowl, it brings up an image of a "real world" out there even if we can only see it from our vantage point.   The goldfish is seeing things accurately from his perspective; his perception only "works" if you are in a bowl, but it is realistic from that perspective.   Knowing that he is in a bowl he could theoretically compensate for the distortion and "see" the world outside of his glass.

But model-dependent realism also echoes idealism or anti-realism in its radical subjectivity, in its agnosticism about whether what we perceive is real or not. It starts from inside our own heads. Inside our own heads, or inside a fishbowl, we can never really say anything about reality, only about what appears to our inner minds as reality. All statements then are self-reports and no more. The only way the goldfish can compensate for his subjective perspective is to presuppose that there really is a world outside the goldfish bowl, that the outside world is not just a deceptive Matrix-like stream of images on the surface of the glass.

So model-dependent realism works as a procedural or operational approach, not as an ontological or epistemological one.   Or so I would think.

As a physical-scientific protocol or tool, I would imagine that model-dependent realism is quite effective. It allows physical scientists to posit certain hypotheses without getting embroiled in scientific dogma (which is, as every high school text will tell you, an obstacle to the pursuit of the physical sciences, though I have started to wonder just a bit about that).   When a new model is (1) more elegant (2) more explanatory (3) more predictive it can replace the old model, no hurt feelings.   Ideally it would keep the natural sciences from infringing on fields outside their own, though in practice with respect to individual scientists it doesn't seem to fully avoid this.

But as a form of philosophy, model-dependent realism seems to add up to a form of scientism -- that whatever can't be quantified, isn't really worth thinking about.   Scientism unfortunately has a tendency to contradict itself -- because it tends to want to pronounce that because its procedures don't work on unquantifiables, that therefore those unquantifiables don't exist. This is illogical.   You can see by drawing a Venn diagram that you can never stand inside a circle and make any pronouncements about what is outside that circle.   If the goldfish holds that everything that exists is within the view of his goldfish bowl, he can't then say that this is a proof that there is nothing beyond the view of his goldfish bowl.

Hawking and Mlodinow, in fact, do not make an explicit case that nothing exists that can't be at least determined probabilistically. Neither do they, in spite of the publicity when the book was released, make a case that God does not exist.   Their case is considerably more limited:

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing ..... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

I was confused when I first read this. Certainly no orthodox Christian, for example, imagines that the role of their God is to act as curator of the universe.... someone to turn on the lights in the morning and turn them off in the evening, and keep things running during the day. What God did the authors think they had pre-empted the necessity of?   Surely not my God, the transcendant and yet immanent, He Who everything else is through, by and in?

I do not know if the authors are making this assumption, but I have seen some scientistis and even some theologians assume that the word "God" is a way for people to explain physical mysteries.   So when there are no more physical mysteries, there is no more need for God.

I have never quite understood that line of thinking, but apparently it came about in the Enlightenment, when philosophy took a post-Cartesian credibility hit and physical science came to the fore as a presumably more realistic substitute given the terms of the Cartesian approach.   Most of the scientists of the time were still Deists, though many of them weren't orthodox.   And the same was true of many theologians. So God did begin to become for them a way to explain what couldn't be explained by empirical methods of the time.   In that approach, God became a component of our thinking, a kind of placeholder, so as our thinking became more scientific, the place for God in our heads got smaller and smaller.

A book by Father Stanley Jaki called Miracles and Physics (short, but difficult, at least for me) discusses this history of thinking in physics and philosophy. I recommend the book.   He thinks many believers inadvertently fall into the trap of using God to explain things in the natural universe that are so far not well comprehended.   This is "the God of the gaps". This is a mistake because not only is it subordinating God to the universe's laws -- making Him sort of a factotum or curator or even wall-moulding material, filling in gaps in our construction-- but it leads to the discrediting of theology whenever one of these mysteries is unpacked.

God is thoroughly outside the universe, though the universe is not thoroughly outside Him. By studying science, we can learn more about Him indirectly and secondarily through His work. For example, the descriptions of magnitudes in The Grand Design gave me a better look at "infinity" by showing it as something altogether different than a "very very very large number", even an unimaginably large number.

To God, who is infinite, even 10 to the 500th power is nothing to boggle at.   The only way I can picture Hawking and Mlodinow seriously supposing His agency to get lost in it as in a field of tulips would be if they really are presupposing that He is a figment of our minds.     In that case, of course, quantity would boggle Him as it does us.

We can never find God while locked within physicalist presumptions, except in negative terms by finding our empiric presumptions unjustifiable (really not that unlikely, since strict empiricism runs into difficulties at every turn) and so looking outside the goldfish bowl.   Certainly we can never demonstrate His absence, any more than the goldfish can demonstrate the non-existence of the rooms beyond his range of sight.

I would take it that Hawking and Mlodinow understand this, and that is why they do not pronounce the non-existence of God, though they clearly think of Him as an unnecessary hypothesis. All in all, I think they do religion a favor by debunking (or at least exposing) a few of the methodological problems that believers and non-believers alike tend to fall into when discussing religion and science.   The book leaves enough questions hanging so that I am not entirely sure whether or not they are actually stating that philosophy and theology are dead and science has taken their place, or are just having fun stirring things up.

Certainly I can't imagine their book really means to settle any philosophical or theological questions -- rather, if anything, I take those elements to be an incidental part of the main objective, which is to extend the boundaries of what we think of as theoretical physics.   And that part of it is the fascinating and evocative part of this book; it is their area of expertise, and they take the trouble to write it in a lively and simple way, with lots of examples and illustrations.

I Beat the Odds

2011-10-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

Our library lends out Kindle books now. Nice!   That was how I got The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, and also I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher.   I had watched the movie The Blind Side with my family last year so that was why I requested the book. To request a book and have it show up in your house just a minute late -- how strange, and now it almost seems normal!

In the book, Oher tells of how he grew up in a houseful of half siblings (he was one of 12, I think) who took care of each other since their mother was often gone completely for days at a time. His father, he only saw a few times in his life.   He didn't have stability, since their family moved from home to home, he was often hungry, and spent time in foster homes and a hospital when not sleeping on friends' sofas or even outside. But he did seem to have love, since his brothers took care of him and they maintained fairly strong family bonds.

His message is that if he could beat the odds, others can too, so he tells his life story from that perspective, trying to figure out what made things work out for him differently than for others.

Some things he thinks helped:

Like Martin Luther King Jr, he had a dream -- but he said lots of kids in the ghetto dream about getting rich and getting out of there, and most of them don't.   But he says that he also noticed that some just dreamed, but others worked for their dream, and he decided to be one of those.

So he set goals; he made plans.   He looked for ways to stand out. When he was about seven, he saw Michael Jordan scoring in a close basketball game and that gave him a more concrete way to think about his future.    He decided that sports was his best way out of poverty.

He learned from spending some time in a well -run foster home that not everyone lived like his family did -- that some people had order in their lives, and regularity.    So he started associating work and order and discipline with success.

As he got older he decided to spend time with the kind of people who had lives like that and were working towards something.   So he made friends who shared his desire to stay out of trouble and get ahead.

He said that he made some bad choices, but his focus was on making as many good choices as he could, and those added up towards turning his life towards better things.

Because he hung around with the type of people who were stable and loving and hardworking, those people tended to take an interest in him, and that was how he first came to the private school where he played varsity sports, and also how he was adopted by the Tuohys as shown in The Blind Side.

He said that though he understood why the movie played it that way, he didn't like the way it portrayed him as sort of slow and dense (though actually, I didn't think it did when I watched it). He was a smart kid who simply was way behind educationally, but when he got a chance, he worked hard and caught right up. In college he made the Chancellor's List in his junior and senior years.

So some natural ability also helped -- both his athletic ability and his intelligence, and it seems to me that he was also blessed by a good temperament, so that though he experienced anger and sorrow, he wasn't overcome by them.

The book reminded me of the concept of psychological resilience, which seems to make a difference for the better in outcome with some kids from disadvantaged or catastrophic situations.

Several factors are found to modify the negative effects of adverse life situations. Many studies show that the primary factor is to have relationships that provide care and support, create love and trust, and offer encouragement, both within and outside the family.

Additional factors are also associated with resilience, like the capacity to make realistic plans, having self-confidence and a positive self image, developing communications skills, and the capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses.

Another protective factor is related to moderating the negative effects of environmental hazards or a stressful situation in order to direct vulnerable individuals to optimistic paths, such as external social support.

It seems like Michael Oher managed to beat the odds by first, receiving some care and support from his brothers even though his parents weren't on the job; by forging relationships with people who could give him external social support; and by cultivating a good work ethic and developing skills that gave him a realistic confidence and pride. He talks about how he once lost his temper at a referee and swore and stalked off the field, and how his coach called him on it, telling him he had to make up his mind to be better than that if he wanted to get out of the environment he was born in.

He mentions that if he hadn't been fast and big as well as determined, he probably would be the guy taking your order at the local Taco Bell, but he figures that would have been OK, because it would be an honest living.

It was an interesting book, especially after watching the movie, and it made me more aware of the role one's own perceptions play in how one does in life.

For some reason I thought of some of Temple Grandin's books when I was reading this one. They aren't at all alike -- she's a woman from a middle class home with Asperger's Syndrome who has a doctorate in psychology and is an expert on humane cattle treatment, while he is a pro left tackle from the inner city who has a degree in criminal defence. But I think it's because they both portray coming from behind and pulling ahead, due to a willingness to learn and improve and a basic faith in their ability to do so. They both also extol the virtues of stability and regularity in upbringing -- she got that from her mom, while he only found it in foster homes and in friends who helped him out. And finally, they both talk about the importance of mentors in a kid's life, especially when the kid has definite goals and vision.

Friday Photo Highlights

2011-10-28T16:40:00.000-07:00

Let's see if I can remember what happened this week.

---1---

First of all, please pray for Matthew Wise, who is suffering from very severe pneumonia (ARDS). At last reports, he was a little more stable, but still in very critical condition.

--2 --

In Tales of Shakespeare, we switched temporarily from Pericles to MacBeth. MacBeth actually works great with Halloween coming up, but even this child's version feels a little dark to my 9 year old. We switched because Pericles doesn't have a BBC Animated Shakespeare version, and MacBeth does, but Paddy now is saying he really doesn't want too much more visualization of witches, ghosts, and dire murders.

--3---

Poor Sean injured his foot and is wearing a cast these days.

Hopefully his last season of high school football isn't over..

---4---

Math with Aidan is going pretty well! We still aren't really making a lot of progress, but we are finding some things to do that we both enjoy, and I figure that as long as he asks to do math and neither of us are frustrated, it's all going well.

I made these addition cards and number lines for him today, but we haven't used them yet -- rather, we did an addition worksheet using numberlines from here. And he watched a couple of Khan Academy videos on addition. He calls them his "Mental Math" and is quite happy with having lectures just like we listen to. He even pauses the video when the instructor presents the problem, showing that he understands the structure of a video lecture, anyway.

---5---

It's getting cold, so I made Autumn Pumpkin Bread today.

--6---

We caught the squirrel that's been living in our roof, and now he is relocated a few miles away from the house, out in the forest. He's a Douglas squirre;, also known as a chickaree because of the sound he makes when he's scolding. He chews a lot, which is one of the reasons we don't want him in our roof.

Go where you will throughout the noble woods of the Sierra Nevada, among the giant pines and spruces of the lower zones, up through the towering Silver Firs to the storm-bent thickets of the summit peaks, you everywhere find this little squirrel the master-existence. Though only a few inches long, so intense is his fiery vigor and restlessness, he stirs every grove with wild life, and makes himself more important than even the huge bears that shuffle through the tangled underbrush beneath him. Every wind is fretted by his voice, almost every bole and branch feels the sting of his sharp feet. ,,,,, He threads the tasseled branches of the pines, stirring their needles like a rustling breeze; now shooting across openings in arrowy lines; now launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden zigzags, and swirling ingiddy loops and spirals around the knotty trunks; getting into what seem to be the most impossible situations without sense of danger; now on his haunches, now on his head; yet ever graceful, and punctuating his most irrepressible outbursts of energy with little dots and dashes of perfect repose.--John Muir, The Mountains of California

--7--

Paddy was listening to the Titanic theme song and feeling thoughtful.

Long Sentences

2011-10-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

A sentence whose form elegantly matches its content:

As a result, I abandoned the collection and undertook the task of describing, by extrapolation from one visible protuberance to another, and with a little probing, the great invisible hulk of the beast, the brooding monstrosity of American educationism, the immense, mindless brute that by now troubles the waters of all, all that is done in our land in the supposed cause of "education," since when, as you see, I can rarely bring myself to write that word without quotation marks, or even fashion a sentence less than nine or ten lines long, lest I inadvertently fail to suggest the creature's awesome dimensions and seemingly endless tentacular complexities.

As you surely guessed, it is from the Foreword of Richard Mitchell's The Graves of Academe, an indispensable book for anyone interested in language and education, and happily available in complete form online.>

I've been looking for Very Long Sentences ever since I read Melanie's post about Slow Language.

Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare are quite packed with Long Sentences, as I found yesterday when I was reading Pericles aloud to my boys with a scratchy throat from a cold. Just one example:

When brave warriors contended at court tournaments for the love of kings' daughters, if one proved sole victor over all the rest, it was usual for the great lady for whose sake these deeds of valour were undertaken, to bestow all her respect upon the conqueror, and Thaisa did not depart from this custom, for she presently dismissed all the princes and knights whom Pericles had vanquished, and distinguished him by her especial favour and regard, crowning him with the wreath of victory, as king of that day's happiness; and Pericles became a most passionate lover of this beauteous princess from the first moment he beheld her.

Thank goodness for those commas, where you can quickly gasp for breath, but it's surprisingly hard to forget through a sentence like that aloud, when you are not quite sure where or when you are going to end up.

If you want to read even more, look at A peaceful day: On Very Long Sentences. (HT: Dawn Garrett)

How about a diagram of a Long Sentence? (a Nathaniel Hawthorne one, from Gene Moutoux's excellent site German-Latin-English where you can also find diagrams of German sentences)

And the original post about the Slow Language Movement, HT to Lissa Wiley, via Melanie.

Nature Walk -- late October

2011-10-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. ~John Muir

There was a planned power outage yesterday so we decided it was a good day to go on a nature walk. So we drove for a few minutes to get to a place where we could see a view, and some different scenery from our usual walk.

“Anyhow we never know where we must go, nor what guides we are to get---people,storms, guardian angels, or sheep....”-- John Muir

“Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray, where nature heals and give strength to body and soul alike. -- John Muir

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. ~John Muir

“When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.”-- John Muir

Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. ~Edward Abbey, "Walking"

“Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.”
― John Muir

“One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.” -- John Muir

Abolition of Man: Dulce et Decorum

2011-10-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

This is for Cindy's book discussion of Abolition of Man by CS Lewis -- this week we are discussing the second chapter of the book, The Way. Go to Cindy's blog Ordo Amoris for her comments and for links to more posts).

Probably most everyone has read Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfrid Owen. I read it in a poetry anthology my parents gave me when I was junior high age. It's a gripping poem describing the horrors of war (Wilfred Owen was a soldier in World War I, the "war to end all wars", in which he ended up dying) and it ends:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

There is no questioning the truth in the experience he recounts; it is I think a blazing corrective to facile jingoism, especially the kind that plays fast and loose with young generous lives. War is certainly ugly enough that we should not rush into it without just cause.

And yet....

CS Lewis was a World War I veteran too. He was wounded, and two of his buddies killed, in that war. One of them was "Paddy" Moore, who had asked Lewis to care for his mother in the event of his death, a commission Lewis carried out conscientiously, to the point of caring for her as his own mother until she died.

It was much later (in 1943) that Lewis wrote Abolition of Man, in which he uses the same tag from the ode by Horace as what he calls the experimentum crucis of the case:

Let us continue to use the previousexample—that of death for a good cause—not, of course,because virtue is the only value or martyrdom the only virtue, butbecause this is the experimentum crucis which shows differentsystems of thought in the clearest light. Let us suppose that anInnovator in values regards dulce et decorum and greaterlove hath no man as mere irrational sentiments which are to bestripped off in order that we may get down to the 'realistic' or'basic' ground of this value. Where will he find such a ground?

He's certainly chosen a good example to test differences in systems of thought. "Greater love hath no man..." seems easier because most of us, no matter how we were brought up, can imagine circumstances in which we would die to save someone else. Even Gaius and Titius, the writers of the Green Book, might risk themselves a little bit for the sake of a true affection, even if against their calmer judgment.

I think the dulce et decorum bit is a little more difficult, perhaps, because it's usually a case of a country sending out its young men to fight for that country. Here trust and gratitude are implied as well as love and loyalty -- trust in the country that is sending you out; trust that your efforts and possible death will mean something to that country; gratitude for the country that has given you a place to stand. You are dedicating yourself to the ideal of honour.

CS Lewis has a footnote in this chapter in which he allows himself an acerbic conclusion to a rather detached though telling list of the Innovators', Gaius's and Titius's, "approvals" and "disapprovals".

Disapprovals: A mother's appeal to achild to be 'brave' is 'nonsense' (Green Book, p. 62). Thereference of the word 'gentleman' is 'extremely vague' (ibid.) 'Tocall a man a coward tells us really nothing about what he does'(p. 64). Feelings about a country or empire are feelings 'aboutnothing in particular' (p. 77).
Approvals: Those who prefer the arts of peace to the artsof war (it is not said in what circumstances) are such that 'we maywant to call them wise men' (p. 65). The pupil is expected 'to believein a democratic community life' (p. 67). 'Contact with the ideas ofother people is, as we know, healthy' (p. 86). The reason forbathrooms ('that people are healthier and pleasanter to meet when theyare clean') is 'too obvious to need mentioning' (p. 142). It will beseen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street inpeace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can aloneproduce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked. Man lives bybread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van:peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering atcolonels and reading newspapers.

You can hardly blame him for that note of acerbity considering his own war-time experience and that of his friends and peers (the UK casualty rate was horrendous; hardly a family was left untouched). Lewis was not talking from an ivory tower when he brought up death for one's country as the test case for a moral system.

Who was it, after all, that had helped ensure that Gaius and Titius could continue to earn their bakery bread writing textbooks which smugly dismissed such things as bravery and honour as mere sentiment to be debunked? Who had been wounded himself, and seen others die, and then had to read that such things were "nonsense" and "about nothing in particular"?

You can see echoes of this same dichotomy in Charlotte Mason's introduction to her last book Philosophy of Education, written shortly after World War I (1922). Mason writes:

These are anxious days for all who are engaged in education. Werejoiced in the fortitude, valour and devotion shown by our men in theWar and recognize that these things are due to the Schools as well asto the fact that England still breeds "very valiant creatures."

.... But what about the abysmalignorance shown in the wrong thinking of many of the men who stayed athome? Are we to blame? I suppose most of us feel that we are: for thesemen are educated as we choose to understand education, that is, theycan read and write, think perversely, and follow an argument, thoughthey are unable to detect a fallacy. If we ask in perplexity, why do somany men and women seem incapable of generous impulse, of reasonedpatriotism, of seeing beyond the circle of their own interests, is notthe answer, that men are enabled for such things by education? Theseare the marks of educated persons; and when millions of men who shouldbe the backbone of the country seem to be dead to public claims, wehave to ask,––Why then are not these persons educated, and what have we given them in lieu ofeducation?

I am not in the military service myself, but I imagine that the reason that soldiers go to fight, suffer and perhaps die is not so much that they long to preserve the steady arrival of bakery vans to suburbs, nor leisure for suburbanites to pronounce smug platitudes about peace and tolerance; rather, that they want to protect things that are precious and yet immaterial, things like freedom and happiness for their mothers and siblings and wives and children, aid to the weak, honor for their nation, so that it doesn't have to kowtow to tyranny.

In other words, precisely the intangibles that men like Gaius and Titius scoff at and debunk for the sake of "realism".

I would take it that when the Roman statesman told his son that it was sweet and seemly to die for his country, he was speaking for himself as well; it was something he would have done himself when he was younger, and he was willing to risk his own progeny to preserve the fatherland.    As CS Lewis pointed out, he was telling his son what he believed to be the truth.

After all, if everyone dies (the ancients were more in touch with their mortality than modern suburbanites are) then how you die is what matters in the end.   This is something Gaius and Titius probably would not understand.

When Gaius and Titius dismiss all those things as meaningless nonsense, they leave themselves and their country only two alternatives.   If they can get everyone else to agree with them, the days of suburbs and timely bakery vans will be numbered, and they will have to learn to be smug organs of whatever tyrannous state results, whether sooner or later. Their death, when it comes, will be a craven and ignominious one, honor and courage traded off for a false peace.

If they realize that their pragmatism is fatal for the survival of their state of life, they are going to have to do something even worse -- brainwash the children in their schools to do something that they would never risk doing themselves, something they believe is "nonsense", though convenient for their country and those that stay at home. They will have to restore some version of Dulce et Decorum, but it will be manipulative propaganda. Their death when it comes will be the death of traitors and exploiters of the young.

(I can think of a third possible alternative -- the path of a conscientious pacifist.   I am leaving that option entirely out of this because this path draws from an appeal to conscience and tradition that Gaius and Titius would think just as nonsensical as the Roman one... they are realists, after all.)

Whether or not I ever have a son who joins the military service, I hope to raise children who realize that these two "realistic" alternatives are no rightful alternatives at all; that when you perceive their bitter toxicity, "dulce et decorum" do not seem like such ironic adjectives anymore.

Quirk Theory

2011-10-25T02:30:00.001-07:00

So, if homeschooled kids are weird, different, quirky and odd.... then they may well be on the track to future success, according to Alexandra Robbins.

She actually doesn't mention homeschooling in her book The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School, but the message is clear that the very things that put kids in the "cafeteria fringe" are the things that make for interesting, successful adults likely to leave their mark on the world.

Things like creativity, passion for achievement, imagination, divergent thinking, resilience, flexibility, and yes, courage -- for it takes courage to be different. Many of these qualities are shared by homeschoolers, and if you are feeling slightly guilty because your child is marked out as different because he doesn't go to school, the book might help to reassure you that this very differentness can add up to a success trait.

This is the second book I've read by Alexandra Robbins (the first was The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids).

The format was similar:

Robbins selects a small group of students who are representative of her topic in different ways and follows their lives more or less through a school year.
She springboards from these particular details to make broader, researched points about her topic in general.

In this book, she also does something new -- rather than just observe and document, she gets involved in the situation by challenging each of the students to do meet a goal to make their high school experience happier and more like what they want for themselves.

So Whitney, the "popular" girl who hates how mean she has to be to stay in the "in" crowd, attempts to try to be more herself and kinder to the other kids in school, even the "losers". Blue, a self-described gamer/otaku, is challenged to try to make friends with some of the intellectual kids in his AP classes rather than just hang out with the less mature gamers in his old crowd; Joy, a recent immigrant from Jamaica, sets herself a goal of not trying to hide her birth culture, and of nurturing her desire to be helpful to others around her.

Even though it is specifically about the high school experience, this book reminds me a bit of Grace Llewellyn's books like Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School.   Robbins, like Llewellyn, treats the high schoolers' lives, aspirations and challenges seriously.   They are seen as real people, young adults trying their best to succeed in the environment they are in.   Their individuality is seen as a plus rather than something to be stifled.

Robbins showcases a few examples of famous people who were considered geeks and uncool by their peer group and teachers in high school, including Steven Spielberg, Albert Einstein, Bruce Springsteen, and some fashion designer whose name I can't remember right now.

The book also adds up to a critique of institutional schooling as it exists in our society, particularly the pressures to conform which come both from the peer group and from the standardized test-driven curriculum. There is even mention of how the school administration can become a grownup echo of the high school scene, with cliques, in-groups, shunning, and drama, which makes the adult figures in the school environment either detached from persecution and bullying, or sometimes even complicit in it.   The same can be true for parents; she describes parents who are so desperate for their kids to be accepted that they come off as annoyed with their kids for refusing to drink at parties, and other parents who send their kids the message that they are unhappy because their kids don't meet the increasingly narrow definition of "normal".

More here:

Homeschoolers -- Do they make the grade?

2011-10-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me an article which mentioned a recent study of homeschooling by researchers at Concordia and Mount Allison (see more details here). The study was designed to compare homeschooling with institutional schooling; it took 75 kids between ages 5-10, controlled for demographics, and compared their test results.

The surprise finding, which has been publicized particularly by homeschool curriculum providers, is that homeschoolers who describe themselves as mostly or completely structured outperform their public schooled peers by 1-2 grade levels, while homeschoolers who describe themselves as using little to no structure generally test behind their peers by 1 or more grade levels.

So the conclusion drawn is that structured homeschooling gives an academic edge, while unstructured homeschooling (say, unschooling) leaves the kids at an academic disadvantage.

A few caveats come immediately to my mind, as no doubt they do to yours:

This is a very small and localized study -- 75 kids from Novia Scotia and New Brunswick, half homeschooled and half public schooled.

A commentary by Dr Jay Wile of Apologia Science draws out this element

,,,while these results are intriguing, I don’t see them as the final word by any means. This was a very small study. It had to be, given the fact that the authors tested each student. The “structured” group of homeschoolers had 25 students, and the “unstructured” group had only 12. There were 37 students in the publicly-schooled group. Such small studies make it hard to draw serious conclusions, unless the measured differences are very large.

(he does go on to mention that the differences were fairly marked, so you could draw some conclusions in spite of the small size and incidental nature of the findings).

The study didn't set out to measure disparities between structure and non-structure in the homeschool -

-it was set up to measure the difference between homeschooled and public schooled kids. The structure vs non-structure finding was incidental, and broke down to approximately 25 children in the structured group and 12 in the unstructured group.

The categories, according to this site, were described as:

• Kids who “often” or “always” got structured, organized lesson plans, and
• Kids who “rarely” or “never” got structure

That leaves a lot of ground for vagueness.... what is meant by structured, organized lesson plans or lack of structure?

An analysis of the study at Homeschool Research Notes mentions this:

I found the distinction between “structured” and “unstructured” homeschoolers a bit unsatisfying, especially given how significant it is in this analysis. Here’s why. As any veteran homeschooler will tell you, there’s no hard-and-fast distinction here. There’s a continuum. Furthermore, researchers have consistently found that over time families tend to move along that continuum from structure to unstructure. This paper’s facile distinction misses both of those points. The paper also fails to consider length of time homeschooling among its subjects. Had the “structured homeschoolers” been homeschooling their entire lives? For just a few months? We don’t know, though the researchers themselves pointed out the significance of this question in their opening discussion of Rudner.

All the kids tested were between the ages of 5 to 10.

This to me makes a BIG difference, especially as a mom of older AND younger kids who has used both structure and non structure (and various other styles on the continuum)

Primary age children are by no means finished educational products. It is sort of like measuring 10-15 month olds on their ability to walk. The natural variations are immense at that age, not due to innate capacity, but simply maturity levels and developmental pacing. Relaxed forms of schooling tend to respect the child's natural developmental pace, presumably with the confidence that this is best for the child in the long run. We can't see by this study whether or not this trust is warranted, since it doesn't extend to older children.   There seems to be an assumption that children who are "behind" at age 8 will continue to be "behind" at age 18, but this is by no means a safe assumption to make, especially with regard to homeschoolers. Evidence abounds that children progress rapidly when readiness and opportunity are there.

I know kids who between the age of 5 and 10 could relish and understand Shakespeare, who were thoughtful conversants in history and literature, who yet scored poorly on tests of spelling and mechanics. But by age 18 there was a different picture, as those same kids were excelling in all areas, reading voraciously, invested in and serious about their learning.   And on the other hand, I have met my share of kids who have had years of structured schooling and are pretty much burned out on academics by the time they graduate. Of course, anecdotes are not statistics, but the matter does definitely seem to warrant further study.

Finally, we are talking about scores on academic achievement tests.

In other words, we are assuming that achievement tests are a good way to measure ... .um, what? Success in learning? Ability to have a meaningful life?   Success in taking achievement tests?   That is unclear, at least in the articles I found that discussed the study.   For purposes of clarity, it might be good to at least state the premise, which seems to be that academic achievement test scores given to 5 to 10 year olds marks something more significant than simply practice, or the lack of it, in doing the kind of thing presented in achievement tests.

Just to take the example that comes readily to mind, Bitzer would score way better than Sissy Jupe on what a horse really is, in the School of Gradgrind. There are certainly some legitimate philosophical differences on how seriously to take standardized test scores, especially pre-highschool.

This article comments:

Does this study mean that unstructured homeschooling–sometimes called “unschooling”–is a bad idea? No. The sample size is too small, and we lack information about causation.

Maybe some parents choose unschooling because their kids have characteristics than make them perform poorly on standardized achievement tests

Bottom line is that there isn't a bottom line yet.

There is no immediate call to rush out and buy a bunch of workbooks or sign on for a correspondence program, if that isn't what you think is best for your homeschool. And there is a possible danger in doing so for the wrong reasons. Most homeschoolers are working hard at educating their children for reasons that go beyond high scores in standardized tests for their under-tens. So recall those reasons and do what seems to be best in support of those.

Some interesting further questions that come to mind as possibilities for future study:

Are there different kinds of non-structure? (perhaps intentional vs chaotic?) Are there different outcomes depending on the type?
How closely do lower scores in achievement tests reflect future achievement in homeschoolers? (the picture would look different in schools, since kids who aren't reading on schedule are sometimes placed in remedial classes which can sometimes add up to a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Are there different types of "structure?" (I have never used very many workbooks or textbooks in my homeschool, for instance, but some years are more planned than others. Unit studies and Montessori also come to mind as alternative forms of structure, which might look different on standardized tests in the early years).
Do some homeschoolers start off relaxed in the early years and become more structured as the children grow older? Or vice versa?
What type of homeschooler is most likely to "stay the course", to homeschool throughout the whole course of education and have good results in terms of life success? Are there any predictive markers or traits for this kind of long-term results?

The Pupil of the Eye

2011-10-22T22:52:00.000-07:00

A friend's apple tree in late September

The antiphon for last week's Mass was Psalm 17:

I call on you, my God, for you will answer me;
turn your ear to me and hear my prayer.
... Keep me as the apple of your eye;
hide me in the shadow of your wings

In the missal, "apple" was rendered "pupil", and that made me curious. And indeed, according to this site, that is what the phrase originally referred to:
....

This evocative phrase turns up both in the King James Bible: “He kept him as the apple of his eye” (Deuteronomy), and in Shakespeare: “Flower of this purple dye, / Hit with Cupid’s archery, / Sink in apple of his eye”, (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). But it’s older than either of these, almost as old as the language, since the first recorded examples can be found in the works of King Alfred at the end of the ninth century.

At this time, the pupil of the eye was thought to be a solid object and was actually called the apple...

When I read the antiphon in the missal, I suddenly had an image of a hand flying up to protect one's valuable sight, and of a bird instinctively hiding its precious young under its wing to protect it. Those are really deeply felt metaphors. Having heard the Psalm so many times, I tend to take it for granted, just as a child might take it for granted that his mother and father work to provide for him.

But really, it is extraordinary that the Psalmist would be inspired to ask for this level of care. I'm reading Quo Vadis right now; I don't assume that fiction is reality, but in the book, the Romans offer sacrifices to their gods to get what they are asking for. There is a kind of cynicism, as if the gods were slightly corrupt officials who could be persuaded to accept a bribe if the price and circumstances were right.

How different it is with the Psalmist's God!

As Christians two millenia after the Resurrection, we are used to hearing that God loves us, but how touching and unusual for those ancient times, that image of sheltering as one would shelter one's own eyes or one's young: one's vision and one's hope of the future.

A picture Aidan took after Mass