Curious hands, hungry fingers January 21, 2009
Posted by philangelus in kiddos, religion.add a comment
I’ve mentioned before how Kiddo#4 has curious hands and hungry fingers. He’s the grabbiest baby I’ve ever seen, taking in the world and needing to touch everything that comes within reach.
He’s a lot happier now that he can move about independently and feed his own hungry fingers. Prior to that, he had to wait for me to hand things to him, or to come accidentally within reach of something. Now, he can reward himself. In fact, he gets a self-satisfied grin when he crawls to something he never did before. You can just hear him thinking, “See, Momma? I rewarded myself.”
Nowadays, when he wakes up, it’s an instant race as he flips onto all fours and makes a beeline for my bookcase headboard where he can grab all the things I left on the shelf. He considers it the buffet for his hungry fingers.
On Sunday, we went to church in the snow. By which I mean, snow was falling at about an inch an hour, and there were three inches on the ground already. We had no idea it was that bad when we started, but it was bad enough by the time we got out that we opted against getting Sunday donuts! You know it’s bad for that to happen.
We were bundled up tight, but I’d forgotten to invert the sleeves of the baby’s snowsuit in order to make them mittens. (The best feature ever, by the way.) And as we went outside, he saw the snow.
Falling, cold, white, clear, brilliant.
And with his face a mask of delighted wonder, he reached out his hungry fingers to sample the air.
I watched him for a while as he tried so many times to grasp the ungraspable, trying to figure out the whiteness and the cold, things he couldn’t touch but which he could see and feel. It was like magic to him, a whole wonderful world he’d never known before. And he laughed.
My next thought was, just like grace. Ungraspable. Brilliant, Ephemeral. And when it’s all around us, sometimes the best we can do is to laugh in delight.
More little wonders January 20, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion.3 comments
Yesterday we talked about “little wonders,” how we can infuse our daily activities with the Divine just by being conscious that we’re doing the work for God. And in that way, little actions can pick up eternal significance.
Let’s play with this a little bit. I’m a mother (no, really, look at the weblog title) and there are two ways I can interact with my kids. The first is, they come with me on what I do. I bring them to the grocery store, or they join me kneading pizza dough, or they imitate me as I work on my computer (Kiddo#4 loves to bang on a keyboard) or maybe they ask me to teach them to do something I can do (as Kiddo#2 is learning to knit.)
The other way is that I can join them in their activities. I can get down on the floor and build with blocks or run a car across the floor, and in that way I’ve come to them.
It occurred to me that most of the time when we experience the Divine, or when we try to, it’s the first method. We might go to church, or pray, or read, or do some kind of consciousness-raising activity designed to bring ourselves onto a higher plane where we can meet with God. Kind of like us joining God and saying, “Teach me to knit” (or to forgive, or how to pray.)
But it’s just as valid to sit down here playing in my corner and allow God to come sit beside me and play with my building blocks, or to be with me as I fold laundry, or as I bake cookies. God doesn’t have the kind of pride that would prevent Him from getting down on our level and enjoying things with us. You could, in fact, say the Incarnation is the ultimate expression of a parent getting down on the carpet to play with the kids.
Us trying to go up to God is worship. God coming down to us is Grace. And grace comes to us of God’s own whim, its own little wonder. We just have to be aware enough that it’s happening to hand Him one of our toys and let Him join the game.
Little Wonders January 19, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels, religion.4 comments
In addition to a Stealth Christian playlist, I have a guardian mix of “guardian angel songs.” They’re along the same lines as the stealth Christian, where the artists would be stunned to know I associate their songs with angels.
Without going into why I’ve made this association, on the guardian mix is “Little Wonders” by Rob Thomas. Here’s the chorus:
Our lives are made
In these small hours
These little wonders
These twists and turns of fate
Time falls away,
But these small hours
These small hours still remain
On Saturday afternoon I was baking cookies while the kids watched TV. I had the guardian mix on my iPod, and I alternated between baking and dancing (or sometimes both at the same time. I’m not very good at either, you see.)
I was spooning dough onto the cookie sheet when I felt intensely aware of angelic presence. I waited a moment, keeping myself silent inside, and then I got this strong sense: this was one of those small hours, one of the little wonders. Me baking cookies. A cold day, a warm house, a moment together, something I wouldn’t remember tomorrow and simultaneously something eternal.
And that led to something bigger: that this was how we “pray always” the way Jesus said. That being fully present in the moment is one way of prayer, that bringing our work before God and presenting it before Him is itself a gift, a prayer, and these little things we do honestly and cleanly will last forever.
I’ve been re-reading one of the books that formed my early spirituality, “Light and Peace” by R. P. Quadrupani. I don’t even know if it’s still in print, but it’s a very common-sense approach to Christian living, filled with quotes from St. Francis de Sales and drawing to a lesser extent on others. (What do you want to bet this is the first time anyone’s written about St. Frances de Sales in the same weblog entry as Rob Thomas?)
This is what it says about being in the Presence of God:
Frequently the fear comes to you that you have failed to keep yourself in the presence of God because you have not thought of Him. This is a mistaken idea. You can, without the definite thought, perform all your actions for love of God and in His presence, by virtue of the intention you had in beginning them. … Though the doctor did not have the invalid in mind when he is preparing the medicine that is to restore him to health, nevertheless it is for him he is working… In like manner, when you fulfill your domestic or social duties, when you eat or walk, devote yourself to study or to manual labor, though it be without definitely thinking of God, you are acting for Him, and this ought to set your mind at rest in regard to the merit of your actions.
Baking as prayer. Work as prayer. Work as being in the presence of God.
Star Wars: retold January 17, 2009
Posted by philangelus in religion, sarcasm, writing.3 comments
If you haven’t already seen this video, do go see it, otherwise you’re in the same position as Amanda.
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) is a four-minute video (with animation) of a retelling of the Star Wars trilogy (the real one) by someone who says she doesn’t need to see it, since she already knows all about what happens. The video-maker recorded her description.
While it’s hilarious what she gets wrong, what I find amazing is how much she gets right. My Patient Husband said, “She didn’t get anything right,” and I found myself in the position of the mom in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” and saying, “Actually, take a closer look.”
She names all the main characters of the series. She doesn’t waste time on characters who play only a bit part, like Boba Fett.
All those characters are correctly identified with the correct sides they’re on.
While the timeline is a bit messed up, she’s organized it pretty well if it were one movie with a coherent storyline. (Don’t get into that: Empire Strikes Back and Jedi are both riddled with continuity errors and retcon.)
She gets the heart of the internal and external conflicts.
In short, for someone who never saw the films, she’s absorbed most of the pertinent points of them, and one assumes that was all passive learning because she isn’t interested in actually seeing the movies.
My Patient Husband said, “Maybe she reconstructed the movies by looking at the action figures,” but I don’t see that to be the case for two reasons. One, that if she went to a rack of action figures, she’d find lots of minor characters and no Han Solos. We all know that song and dance, how there’s never any of the popular characters left because, well, they’re popular.
And secondly, she didn’t mention any vehicles, which have to be more than half the Star Wars toys. Other than the Death Star, there’s not any machinery mentioned.
What this tells me is that humans are innately keyed to “Story” and we like to fit things into predictable patterns and understandable bites. We like beginnings, middles and endings. And, as I’ve asserted before, that points to God as a story-teller.
But this is all a ton of overthinking. Just go over there and laugh your head off.
Appreciate A Dragon Day! January 16, 2009
Posted by philangelus in angels, sarcasm.14 comments
Today is, apparently, Appreciate A Dragon Day, so in honor of that, I bring you a little angel-dragon cheer:
The angels in my novel don’t fight dragons. The angels in Seven Archangels: Annihilation aren’t quite this cuddly, nor are most dragons. But hey, that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate them.
And let’s not forget that dragons can appreciate us too. Any dragon worth his hoard appreciates a good electric guitar solo.
Please leave a comment in honor of your favorite dragon. After the nasty stuff that happens in the Book of Revelation, they really need some good PR.
Kiddo#1 brings cookies to school January 16, 2009
Posted by philangelus in food, kiddos.3 comments
Blueraindrop noticed my offhand mention of my son giving a cookie to the rumored-to-be-mean teacher, so I’ll tell the story.
For starters, my kids have Italian blood, and as you all know, one drop of Italian blood is enough to render the entire individual Italian. My children understand that we spread love with food, and in the Philangelus household, the most compact unit of love is the chocolate chip cookie.
The bus drivers are the most frequent recipients of bakery love, but sometimes the teachers receive it too, as do the neighbors and anyone to whom I owe a favor. (Cookies are good placeholders for favors-owed, by the way. They let people know in a delicious way you’re aware you’re in their debt.)
Back in December, one of the teachers was having a holiday party before the holiday break. (Aren’t I PC?) My son came home and informed me that I was being voluntold to make cookies.
I pointed out that if I’m going to bake for 45 minutes, I want to at least eat some of them. He was a little disturbed and back pedalled: he hadn’t really told them I would bring cookies, just that he’d ask me. Okay, that’s better. I found out how many kids would be partaking of our cookies. I’d need about 60.
The next day I happened to find myself in a store that sold cookies, and ever the opportunist, I resorted to second-class love and purchased two boxes of Newman’s Own organic chocolate oreo-type cookies. These I handed off to Kiddo#1 with instructions that he bring them and be merry, and the second box was “just to be sure.”
He returned home triumphant: The students polished off the entire first box of cookies at the party. Ah, but where was the second box?
My son has taken after his mother. Because he carried that second box of cookies and began handing out cookies to everyone in all his classes. In fact, he started hunting down his teachers and handing off cookies to all of them as well. One teacher said he was evil for bringing her cookies, but she gladly took one.
And on the way out to the bus, he passed The Teacher Rumored To Be Mean, and he offered that gentleman a cookie as well, only to find out the man wasn’t very mean at all. That he was, in fact, nice.
Three cookies went to the bus driver. And my son came home with one left in the box, which I let him finish.
And thus the saga of the cookies, and how yet another child is born to the spirit of Italy even though his true bloodline only carries a fraction of Italian blood.
Stealth songs January 15, 2009
Posted by philangelus in music, religion.8 comments
On my iTunes I have a playlist called “stealth Christian.” They’re songs that I find resonate in a Christian way even though I’m pretty sure they weren’t intended that way.
Offhand, I find Dan Fogelberg’s “Leader Of The Band” to be profoundly Christian, and up until the end that mirage holds pretty well. Jesus was “a cabinet maker’s son” and “his heart was known to none.” He did give to me a gift I know I never can repay, and I try to make that song about him when it comes on the radio.
Another one is, so help me, “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence. I cannot hear that song without hearing a human soul returning to God and asking for forgiveness. “Breathe into me and make me real,” she sings. In the background, the male voice sings, “There’s nothing inside.” To me it truly sounds like the torment a soul goes through when it wants to leave behind this world and cling to the eternal and the good. And naturally, while that’s going on, the soul expresses itself as it is rather than as it hopes to become because that’s all it can do.
Recently, I’ve been hearing Lifehouse’s song Broken
One trip to the library later, I popped the CD into my player and was blown away by the album version. It’s definitely starker, and you can hear the near-despair so much better without all the junk thrown on top of the vocals in the radio version. That’s the version I purchased.
But who is he singing to? Who is the “you” in the song? And I’m deciding now it’s got to be God he’s singing to.
“I’m hanging on / another day / just to see / what you’ll throw my way. / And I’m holding on / to what you say. / You said that I would / be okay.”
When he says “In your name, I find meaning,” I can’t imagine a non-divine antecedent of that pronoun. And yet if it’s there, it’s totally hidden.
I think it will go on my Stealth Christian play list. Like the others, I’m pretty sure that’s unintended. But not totally sure, and I’m wondering what others think.
Ah, er, I mean– January 14, 2009
Posted by philangelus in Asperger's, kiddos, sarcasm.3 comments
Kiddo#1 said to me, smirking, “If you get in trouble at school, do you think they’d send you to the principal’s office, or to the gym teacher’s office?”
Not being quite as dumb as a potato, I remember being introduced to the gym teacher when I registered my son for middle school. The gym teacher is also the vice principal.
So I replied, “Obviously they’d send you to the gym teacher because he has both the authority and the mojo to kick your butt.”
Son was disappointed that he hadn’t caught me out. I said to him, “How many times have you been sent to his office?”
“None!” He looked offended, but a little cagey.
“So he came to your classroom?”
“No!” By now he looked really worried. “If I’d gotten in trouble, you’d have heard about it because Mrs. Smith would have — er, I mean, one of the teachers would have emailed you.”
My Patient Husband said, “Oh, okay. Now we know that whatever you did, you did it in Mrs. Smith’s class.”
The thing is, I’m pretty sure the kid didn’t actually get in trouble. He’s never gotten in trouble at school, no matter how many meltdowns he was having at home, not even when for three days in a row I considered phoning the police. He held it together fine at school and that was that. He’ll break every rule in the house but at school he’s always on the right side of the line.
But by this point, I was having fun, and I said, “You keep digging the grave a little deeper here. Why don’t you just tell us what you did?”
And then to my surprise, he answered, but it was this strange story about how there’s a third teacher who has an office near Mr. Gym Teacher and Mr. School Counselor, and the third teacher was supposedly very mean but my son since then found out he doesn’t actually eat the heads and hearts of bad students. In fact, my son offered him a cookie one day, and the gentleman accepted it.
The result is, now I’m totally confused. But until I get an email from Mrs. Smith, I have no proof that anything actually went wrong at school, and no understanding whatsoever about why that third gentleman was involved in the tale at all.
But still, even this Alice In Wonderland recitation is better than what happens with the other two:
Me: What did you do at school today?
Kiddo#2: Nothing.
Me: Nothing at all? You sat and stared into space while your teacher gave herself a manicure?
Kiddo#2: No.
Me: *Sigh.*
Read this, kids — it’ll make you cringe January 13, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family, writing.16 comments
A recent article in the Washington Post floated the idea that the Newbery Awards put children off reading.
Why? Because the books selected are frequently downers. And in some cases, they’re inaccessible to the children who read them.
This came up before on my weblog when we discussed The Giving Tree and how I am not alone in despising it. The difficulty here is that children’s literature is the only branch of literature that is not chosen by the individuals who enjoy it.
Imagine the outcry if a bunch of white scholars sat around a table and determined what would be “black literature” and “Latino literature.” Or if only men determined what would be taught in the many women’s literature courses taught in universities around the nation.
But the showpiece texts of children’s literature are not chosen by children. True, they’re frequently enjoyed by children. But not always. And the Newberry Awards do seem to exacerbate this problem.
Children are not reading books in order to raise their consciousnesses, think deeply, or experience catharsis. They do not want moral lessons. (Neither do adults, actually.) What children care about is an entertaining story and characters they can relate to.
Stories about death, bleakness and nihilism really aren’t most kids’ cup of cola, and according to the article, that seems to have made its way into some Newbery selections.
When children are fed a steady diet of “read this, it’s good for you” and then forced to endure a bleak landscape or a heartbreaking ending, they don’t experience what Betsy Lerner referred to in The Forest For The Trees as “a literary orgasm.” They don’t discover the joy of inhabiting another world while firmly within their own. They don’t get to confront their fears and transcend them via the characters. They don’t experience triumph, recognition or that sense of being special.
Is it any wonder that in their off-hours, they then don’t pick up a book?
Try reading in line at the Post Offal — someone is sure to ask you what you’re reading and if it’s any good. The more you try to put your nose back in the book, the more the person badgers you. And I’m convinced it’s because in the back of that person’s mind, he knows reading should be “good for him” and he ought to do more of it, like eating your vegetables and exercising, but he’s just not feeling the love. And the fact that you do love it — that’s just bizarre. He wants to know why.
In an age where reading books for pleasure is something of a rarity, it’s worth the time to find books children can love for their characters and their joy. You can find joy in text. Save the difficult, sad stuff for when they’re older, when they’re already rooted in reading.
My Patient Husband’s Weblog January 12, 2009
Posted by philangelus in family.add a comment
Remember when my Patient Husband started a weblog on the internal server at his job? Well, now he’s doing it on wordpress. Everyone can go read him.
“James Plays Games” has as its stated intention “it’s a gaming journal, plus any other anecdotes that I care to relate.” He’s got three entries up now, so please go visit!
