Can you imagine? November 11, 2009
Posted by philangelus in kiddos, sarcasm.add a comment
The bus stop is always a fun place to have social interactions. They’re pleasant in Angelborough (as opposed to Angeltown, where the other women actively hated me) but there’s a culture gap.
I live in a very small place (my own head) and tend not to notice things about the world around me. The other women are very observant. I have no fashion sense, no style. They do. That sets the stage.
Yesterday at the stop, one mom exclaimed to her daughter, “Do you have toothpaste on your shirt?” There was, I take it, a tiny dot of white. The mother tried to rub it off, then said, “Oh,” frustrated because there was no time to go home. She said, “Well, just zip up your jacket so I don’t have to look at it.”
Another mom said, “Can you imagine? Some parents send their kids to school in dirty clothes?”
Because I speak before thinking on a regular basis, I replied, “I do!”
Stopping cold, they pivoted to face me, as if I’d said, “Sometimes I kick baby bunnies.”
I added, “They’re only going to get dirty at school anyhow, so I figure, why stress about it?”
I own a washing machine, and we’re not strangers. By my estimation, I run 14 loads a week. My children have a supply of clean clothes available when they awaken in the morning. But these are children who think their shirt’s chief purpose is to spare the paper napkin from getting smudged, and who would rather chew their own collars than get an apple from the fridge.
In my opinion, a felt need of childhood is getting dirty. That way, mom can clean you up again and you can get more dirty. Perpetual cleanliness isn’t going to happen in the Philangelus household. If you’re my child, neither are stylish clothes — unless Aunt C. buys for you because Aunt C. has style and class by the tasteful truckload.
Regardless, I had just proudly stated before the world that sometimes I send my children out the door with smudges and rumples.
They did not bring up the matter again. For all I know, they may be staging an intervention. Saints Styleus and Fabrica, pray for us.
Imperfection November 10, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion.27 comments
Ivy tells me that in Judaism, you can sin without knowing it, which frightens the heck out of me.
In Christianity you have to know what you’re doing in order to sin. It’s the difference between an orthodoxy (believing right) and an orthopraxy (doing right.) You see that most explicitly when Jesus says that if you nurture anger, you’ve committed murder in your heart.
But according to Ivy, if you’re Jewish and you buy a package labeled Kosher, you call the manufacturer and verify that it’s Kosher, and then eat it assuming it’s Kosher, but it’s not, then you’ve sinned against the dietary laws.
In the book I’m going to review later this week, I came across a distinction I’d never seen in a Christian book (which is saying something!) that if you fail to respond to God’s prompting in a loving way,that’s not a sin. That’s an imperfection.
Sitting at the bus stop while reading, I bolted up and took notice. Really? You mean–those aren’t sins?
I’d considered those things “sins of omission.” But now I find they’re not sins at all.
So here’s the new lineup, as I understand it:
- You punch your brother in the face: sin of commission.
- You notice your brother parking in a no-parking zone and keep that information to yourself so his car gets towed: sin of omission
- Your brother is having a bad day, and you could say something to cheer him up, but you don’t: imperfection
Or to give another example, failing to file your income tax would be a sin against the United States Of America (we call it a crime) whereas failing to vote is merely apathy. Imperfection.
God deserves perfection, but let’s face facts: he’s not going to get it from me. I’d like to give it to him, but there are limits to what I can do, how often I will respond. How often my cranky self or my tired self will take over against The Spiritual Perfect Self I Was Designed To Be. (TSPSIWDTB has not, in fact, shown her face around here since I was six months old and spit out my pastina.)
But those aren’t crimes. They’re failures to become a better person, to be God’s hands to others — but they’re not crimes.
All of a sudden, it’s more like weeding a garden than I thought. (Thank you for that metaphor, St. Catherine.) Life is good! There’s plenty to work on, but life is good.
death online November 9, 2009
Posted by philangelus in pensive.6 comments
On my parenting board this weekend, we found out one of the longtime members had died. It’s hit the board overall very hard. She was a much-loved member, and it was unexpected.
I didn’t interact with this particular person all that much. It’s not that I disliked her, but that we had different areas of interest, and because it’s such a large and active group, our paths seldom crossed. So I’m sad for her and her family, and I’m heartbroken for those who’ve lost a friend, but I’m staying quiet there to respect their mourning.
It got me thinking to other internet boards, and the losses I’ve seen there. On the anencephaly support board, of course, we saw death all the time. We united because of death, and death kept us there until it became familiar like a shadow. It wasn’t a good thing, but we made it into something good.
But in those cases, we weren’t notified of member deaths, if there were any. (There’s one woman I always wondered if she took her own life after her baby died, but I’ll never be able to find out.) In over ten years online, I can only thing of three times when the member of a board has died.
OmniCindy from EtiquetteHell died shortly after Hurricane Katrina. She was kind-hearted and generous, and I always got a giggle from how she referred to her husband as “Mr. Cindy.” That was why I began referring to my Patient Husband as Mr. Tabris, but that wasn’t nearly as funny. Others did the same, using their own screen name for their spouse.
I belonged to a due-date group when pregnant with Kiddo#3, and we organized a “baby shower in a box” for one another. Adele was the woman who sent me a box: some Burt’s Bees products and a cute pair of yellow socks. Adele died during childbirth of an amniotic fluid embolism. Her death hit me harder. I went that morning to my prenatal appointment and sat numb as the midwife came in. I told her what happened, and she looked drawn, sad too at the thought of a motherless baby. Sometimes I think of that child, within days of Kiddo#3’s age, growing up motherless.
We touch people online and don’t realize how many, how often. We cast our nets wide and we learn about one another, share bits of one another. It’s good. I’m not disputing that. Even in death, the community tightens up behind you and they cling together, and it’s good they have each other.
A while ago I got a panicked thought that if I died, you guys wouldn’t know, so I gave my Patient Husband access to post here. Not that I anticipate it, but at least you’d be notified.
In the meantime, I’m thankful for one another, for the online friendships we’ve forged, for the prayers and support we give one another. Please say a prayer for Shelly and her devastated family, and thank you for being here.
My grandfather’s pen November 5, 2009
Posted by philangelus in writing.4 comments
My grandfather died when I was 5, but I have a few memories of him. I remember the moment I realized that I could always bring him a book while he sat in that orange easy chair, and I could sit on the arm, and he’d read to me. I remember realizing that was the pattern, and something I could always count on.
When I was in my early teens, I came across an old Parker pen in my grandmother’s antique desk. When I brought it to her, she told me it was my grandfather’s, and since I was already a writer (of sorts, hah) she said I could have it.
I already had begun my love of A Beautiful Pen, although I hadn’t been bitten bad yet. In fact, this was the first Beautiful Pen I’d ever been given. I had many Cool Pens, but this was lovely.
At the time (as for the next decade) I hand-wrote my novels first. I had a little system: all the notebooks had to be the same color (to make identifying the books easier) and I would write with the same pen until it went dry. That’s because the pen contained my book, not yet stretched out, you see. I had to use the same pen so all the book was contained in the same tube of ink. Don’t tell me this is stupid. It worked, didn’t it?
Unfortunately,when I tried to write with Grandpa’s pen, the pen was dry. Oh well. At the time, I didn’t realize you could buy a refill for a Parker Pen, so I just brought home the pen and put it in my desk drawer.
Because it was my grandfather’s pen, though, every so often, I’d bring it out and scribble with it a bit. But it was still dry.
One day I mentioned this pen to my mother, who said, “What pen?” I produced the pen for her from my pit of a desk, and I showed her it was dry…
…except that it wrote.
And it kept writing. And kept writing. And I kept writing with it, using it for the current novel, keeping it with me at school. I don’t recall if it ever ran out of ink after that (until I left it behind for college, so it wouldn’t get lost or stolen).
It was my Grandfather’s pen, and I like to think he prays for me and cares for me, and he wanted to bless me with a never-ending supply of stories to match the ones he read me as a preschooler.
My daughter’s solid C November 4, 2009
Posted by philangelus in kiddos, sarcasm.15 comments
As I said yesterday, my daughter’s teacher will indeed be sighing with relief in June because I’m a subversive mom.
Kiddo#2 is in third grade and learning to write cursive. She told me yesterday, “I can write a C in cursive, but the teacher won’t let me.”
She won’t? Why?
“Because we haven’t learned to do it yet.”
But you know how to do it.
“But I’m still not allowed.”
I said to her, “The next time this comes up, I want you to say, ‘Thank you, Mrs. {Teacher}, for teaching me the value of mediocrity. This skill will serve me well all the days of my life.”
She said, “Huh?”
I said, “If you know how to write a C, then it’s ridiculous to make you stop and print it just because some of the kids in the class might not know it yet. Is she going to stop you from reading Harry Potter just because some of the kids in your class can’t read it? If you use a big word in a report, is she going to make you rewrite the report just because you haven’t learned that word in vocabulary yet?”
Probably it’s for the best that Kiddo#2 didn’t get what I was saying. But at the same time, I’m horror-struck by the fact that she’s being told not to do her best by an institution which ought to be encouraging her to expand her horizons and challenge herself every day.
I’m not sure this is worth a note to the teacher. It’s just the letter C. But it’s also a lot more than the C: it’s my daughter being told to be a C-student when she could be doing far better. It’s the triumph of mediocrity, the glorification of the lowest common denominator, in place of her eagerness to learn zipping along at the speed of light.
Thanks for noticing! November 3, 2009
Posted by philangelus in kiddos, sarcasm.14 comments
Now I’m “That Mom.” The mom of the kid you don’t want in your classroom because her mom is That Mom.
Kiddo#2 told us that in the hallway outside her classroom, there’s a sign that says “We Are Thankful For.” I asked what they were thankful for, and she told me they hadn’t put anything on the bulletin board yet.
I said, “I bet in a week or so, you’ll have to do a project about something you’re thankful for.”
It’s a public school, if you’re wondering, so the kids can’t be thankful to God. But at the same time, they’re not really expected to be thankful to anyone else, either. They’re just supposed to be thankful in isolation. It makes no sense: Thankful is supposed to have an object; glad doesn’t. Grief needs an object; depression by definiton doesn’t. They’ve turned a directed emotion into nondirected, but that’s another blog entry.
I said to Kiddo#2, “Most of the kids are going to say that they’re thankful for their families, or for their pets, or something like that. You should choose something weird.”
She said, “Like what?”
I said, “You could be thankful for salt shakers.”
My Patient Husband said, “Traffic lights.”
I said, “Indoor plumbing and central heating.”
We came up with a lovely list of things to be thankful for that would be unique on that board of “We Thank Something For The Following Good Things:”
- The internal combustion engine
- Literacy
- The number ten
- The transistor
- The planet Jupiter
- Velcro
- Mitochondria
You get the point. All good things, and yet all under-appreciated in the grand scheme of things as judged by grammar-school bulletin boards.
I have no idea what she’ll actually pick for her thankfulness. But if she takes my advice, the teacher herself will have something to be thankful for at the end of the school year. At least, she will until she looks up one September to find Kiddo#3 in her class.
–
More subversion tomorrow.
Titles November 2, 2009
Posted by philangelus in The New Novel, writing.10 comments
“The New Novel,” which is not so new any longer, has already cycled through two titles and is on its third. Last week, two literary agents blogged about having an effective, grabbing title (here and here) and I realized my titles weren’t catchy.
Titles always have been a hurdle for me to clear. Some folks just know the right title before they’re five pages into the work. Not me. In general, either the title comes to me during the writing (“Scavengers”) or else I sit paralyzed in panic when it occurs to me that I ought to call this thing something. Generally that happens with about four chapters until the end, when I realize I have no name for this book, and it ends…well, it doesn’t.
Remember the fun we had naming the baby? Well, it’s even more fun when I’m naming a book.
This one began with the working title “Viola Jokes.” Of course, as soon as the pen hit the paper, I realized it wasn’t going to have the same type of humor as “Honest And For True” (one that named itself) and once I started querying, someone confirmed what I suspected, that the title wasn’t doing the book any favors. I switched titles to “String Fusion.”
But reading those two agent blogs this week, I realized something which is probably obvious to everyone else out there. Be patient with me, though. I’m dense.
I’m the world’s chief proponent of “your book is not your baby.” I’ve had books rejected, and I’ve had a baby die. I would much rather have the book rejected. Just trust me on this, that I consider myself an expert on both these subjects, and they’re not the same.
When you bestow on a child a name, you’re linking him to both his past and his future. His name will help decide who he becomes. It might provide him with roots. It gives a clue to the values of your family. And in time, he will grow into that identity. A parent would feel rejected if a child changed his name. In fact, one of my relatives did change his name as an overt rejection of his entire family.
But the title for a book? It’s a marketing tool.
Period.
Yes, it used to be different. And with my short stories, I do try to evoke the identity of the story with the title, so I’ll go deeper and leave them enigmatic. (With poetry, the title is the only thing the author is allowed to say about the work.) “Winter Branches” is a beautiful question mark. “Damage” evokes the various damaged characters in the story: Joshua, his parents, and eventually Nezeq himself.
But with a novel, the title is there to draw the reader to take a look at the cover (which is a tool to get the reader to look at the back cover). It’s a marketing tool for the agent to hook the editor, and the editor to hook the editorial board and the sales/marketing department. And then before publication they’ll change it anyhow.
So, goodbye “Viola Jokes” and “String Fusion.” After several days of putting on my marketing hat and shooting title ideas past everyone I could find, I eventually settled on “You Can’t Eat Cake With A Tuning Fork.”
That’s going to change too. We accept that. But hey, it’s not my baby, and it never was.
Revelation and truth October 31, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion.14 comments
Yesterday’s post on Reformation Day generated a lot of comments, so let’s keep it going.
Amy responded to some of the comments about Luther’s beliefs with:
Guys, what matters is TRUTH, not the failings of Luther or anyone else. How has God revealed Himself?
Good question! I’m going to lift my answer out of the comments and do it here instead.
God reveals himself in two main ways: natural and supernatural.
The natural means of understanding God is to study nature and the things God created in order to learn about God through those means. (For example, we can know that God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.) We can study natural law and know about God’s values from the basics of the things he made.
Natural means would include philosophy and logic, things like “I exist, and I know I didn’t make myself, therefore something else made me.”
Supernatural revelation is an understanding of God that cannot be achieved through natural means. Direct communication from God would be one kind of supernatural revelation. Seeing God in a burning bush, or finding a golden book with God’s instructions, or receiving enlightenment under a tree, or being tackled by the Archangel Gabriel in a cave and told to write would all count as supernatural revelation.
Christianity divides supernatural revelation into Public Revelation and Private Revelation. Public Revelation ceased with the closure of the Biblical Canon. Private revelation still continues through the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives, both in a profound way (apparitions, locutions, visible signs) and in ordinary ways (lights and graces.) Private revelation mustbe discerned to make sure it’s really from God.
Catholicism and Orthodoxy understand tradition as the aggregation of established teachings and the combined private revelations that have withstood the test of time. Private revelation and tradition can never contradict the Bible. Canon law is derived from both tradition and scripture.
And like it or not, modern American Protestantism has its own full set of traditions. For example, “accepting Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.” What’s in the Bible as necessary for salvation is merely “repent and be baptized” (according to Peter.)
And I think that covers how God reveals himself to us. Did that satisfactorily answer your question, Amy?
Reformation day October 30, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion.21 comments
Amy Deardon has a post today about Martin Luther and Reformation Day, and since she asked for my feedback, I’ll give some.
I know many regard Martin Luther as a hero. I also know one person who, when we were talking about Heaven, said, “We only know for certain one person is in Hell,” and as I was about to say, “Judas?” he said, “Martin Luther.”
Of course at the time, the Catholic Church was badly in need of reform. But you also had people such as St. Philip Neri who were reforming it from the inside. The results he had in Rome showed that people were hungry for a real, active faith. It isn’t necessary to leave a system in order to patch it up. Imagine if your spouse came to you and said, “We need to reform our marriage, so I’m going to divorce you and move a thousand miles away.”
Martin Luther leaves a legacy of differences that pretty much prevent reconciliation between Protestantism and Catholicism.
1) he changed the canon of the Bible from what had been recognized since the fourth century
2) Sola fide, the doctrine that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone
3) Sola scriptura, the doctrine that only what’s in the Bible can be considered authoritative.
Along with sola scriptura comes the injunction that you the reader determine what scripture actually means, which places new Christians in the intriguing position of needing to decide what teachings best align with scripture before they’ve actually read scripture very much at all. So you have to become an expert in order to begin learning. (Which is why some people resort to literalism and all its difficulties.)
As for #1, I have no idea why he thought he had the authority to do that, but you can see why someone would reject external authority and tradition if he wanted to reject several books of the Bible.
For #3, sola scriptura has no scriptural basis. In fact, we mentioned here earlier how the scriptures themselves extol the importance of sacred tradition. In order for sola scriptura to work at all, we’d need an infallible table of contents to go with the infallible scriptures, and we don’t. Jesus didn’t give us a set of documents: he gave us a Church, and the Church gave us the Bible.
And #2, sola fide, my favorite because it creates people who froth at the mouth and snarl things at me like “Are you saying that our SINS can DEPRIVE us of HEAVEN?” Uh, yeah, they can. The Bible doesn’t hold with sola fide either. 1 Corinthians 13:2
If I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
Salvation comes through faith working in love. In Revelation, the good deeds of the saints are the only things that follow them into the next life. When Jesus talks about separating the sheep and the goats, he talks about it solely in terms of deeds (“I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink,” etc.)
But the ultimate test of anything is the fruit it bears, and what is the fruit of Luther’s work? Well, the Church is definitely reformed, although as I mentioned, others worked within the structure too in order to reform it. Simply leaving will never reform a corrupt organization.
But what we do see is something like thirty thousand different denominations of Protestantism, and I’m not so sure that’s what Luther would have wanted, that anyone who disagrees with a church can shear off and begin his own newly-reformed version of the church. It’s not the unity that Paul talks about in the Spirit, not the unity that Jesus wanted, that we might all be one as he and the Father are one.
—
EDITED: Amy asked a follow-up question in the comments,and I answered it in the next day’s post.
Also, a reader who didn’t wish to comment in public said:
I just wonder if some mention of the joint declaration on Lutherans and Catholics on justification by faith might be good here?
School PROCEDURE October 29, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, sarcasm.6 comments
I had to pick up Kiddo#3 early from school so I could take Kiddo#1 to a doctor’s appointment. I wouldn’t be back in time to get K3 from the school bus. Kiddo#2 had a field trip and would be returning late.
The schools are adjacent, so here’s the plan:
- Arrive at elementary school at 1:25; pick up Kiddo#3;
- go across lot to Middle School; pick up Kiddo#1 by 1:35;
- be at appointment in TenMilesAway at 2:00.
Here’s how it worked:
Step One: Arrive at grammar school at 1:25 to find no Kiddo#3 waiting for dismissal. I had sent a note into the school requesting this, but alas, the teacher can’t read? I asked the secretary if I could go get him, but no, she said she’d page him. Five minutes later, he finally appears in the hallway, and I decided this was stupid. I illegally walked down the hall to his locker to help him get packed and out of the school.
Why does this annoy me? Because the school sent home a pre-printed pad on which I could fill out things like early dismissal requests. The pad has a hundred sheets of paper on it! How many times do they think my kid will leave early?
Do you remember the school policy about not sending home a menu because they want to save paper? So that’s their policy in a nutshell: eight menus printed per year will destroy the rainforests, but these pads were created by the paper fairies in order to be ignored.
Step two: I go to the middle school, which shares a building with the high school. The whole way there, Kiddo#3 asks me, over and over again, “Where are we going?” as if he has never heard this before. Not even once. I have to be buzzed into the school through the high school entrance, after which I walk upstairs to the middle school office.
Or at least, that’s how it should have worked. Instead, someone ran out of the office and stopped me.
Her: Ma’am? You need to go into the office.
Me: I’m going to the middle school office.
Her: But you need to check in at the high school office.
Me: My son isn’t in high school. He’s in middle school.
Her: You have to check in anyhow.
Me: Why are you doing this to me?
Because I’ve been doing this for two years and they’ve never stopped me before. Not even once. She insisted it was PROCEDURE. So I went into the office and said to the three vapid people standing behind the counter, “Where do I sign in?”
They all stared at me stupidly, because I guess no one actually follows PROCEDURE. The woman from the hall then came in the back door andsaid, “Sign in on the {something} and then get a visitor sticker.”
I put my name on the visitor sticker. I didn’t sign any of the books because I couldn’t figure out which one to sign because guess what? My son isn’t in the high school. And he had a note in the middle school office dismissing him at 1:35 (which had already passed by that time.)
So I signed nothing. Which I guess is PROCEDURE.
It’s not for safety. It’s just for PROCEDURE. Because in no way did my stop there make it safe. For a safety check, you would expect:
- they’d ask my name
- they’d ask whom I’m picking up
- they’d ask to see some ID
- they’d have watched me to make sure I actually signed in
- they wouldn’t have let me leave the school still having the visitor pass in my hand so that next time, I can point to it and say, “See, I’ve followed PROCEDURE.”
So there’s the moral of the story for you. The schools follow PROCEDURE when they feel like it, or rather, they force parents to follow PROCEDURE when it’s good for the school. But other than that, they don’t honestly give a rip because it’s just too much trouble to do it right or do it consistently.
