Small Sentiment Saturday

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with several pails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way, and laid on the color in great washes, it might drip down again on one's face in floods of rich and mingled color like some strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to.”

--G. K. Chesterton

Picking Sunflowers

Once upon a time, my Dad told me a story on the way home from work.

I have the good fortune of being able to carpool with my dad to work. This is fortunate for me, because it means I don’t have to spend much of my hard-earned cash for gas, and it gives me time to read books instead of paying attention to traffic for an hour and a half every day. Plus, it gives me the opportunity for quality conversation with Dad when I feel so inclined, although most of our trips are relatively silent.

Today, however, he began telling me about his day at work, and after awhile, asked “Have I ever told you about picking sunflowers?”

“No,” I said, so he told me.

“Well, it was when I was about six or eight. My dad was a member of the Jaycees, which means Junior Chamber of Commerce, which was a group of young men, under thirty-five, and they worked for the improvement of the community. They put up the shelter in the park. I remember a bunch of them put on their hats and tool belts and got together and built it. I thought it was a church group or something to do with church, because they always met there, but I was little.

“Sometimes they would do projects to put some money in their coffers to fund these things that they did. One time a farmer called them and said he had this cornfield that he wanted to combine, but it was full of sunflowers, and he couldn’t combine it with all those sunflowers in it, because they would contaminate the corn and he wouldn’t get a good price at the elevator. So Dad and the other men went out to walk that cornfield. [Cousin about the same age] was visiting at the time, so he and I got to come along.

“The sunflowers were all different sizes. Some were big and some were little, and they were cutting them out with corn hooks, because that was the way you did it.  Dad could reach six rows, with me and my cousin on either side, because you could reach more rows than you could see, and you could do more rows at once as long as you noticed all the sunflowers. So he had us on either side of him and he could do six or eight rows that way instead of just three.

“Well we started out, and then all of a sudden I noticed that everyone else was getting way ahead of me. I was pulling up all kinds of little sunflowers, and they were missing them. My cousin was keeping right up, and I was getting further and further behind. I was quite worked up about it, because I was doing it right and they were all doing it wrong.

“I called out to them that they were missing all these sunflowers, and my dad came back and explained to me that we didn’t need to worry about the little sunflowers. They wouldn’t get big enough by harvest-time to cause any problems. What we needed to worry about was the big ones with the heads on that had seeds, and the ones that would form heads by the time the combine came through. ‘The ones about as big as you,’ he said.

“Well I hadn’t known that. I had got so caught up in picking all  the sunflowers, and hadn’t thought about which ones were going to cause problems and which weren’t. I was like that when I was little. I tended to get caught up in the details.

 

“I have never forgotten that, because life is like that sometimes too. Sometimes you don’t need to pick all the sunflowers, just the ones that are going to cause you problems. It doesn’t pay to get worked up about things that aren’t going to matter in the long run anyway.”

Till We Have Faces

I have for a very long time been a great fan of C. S. Lewis. He is easier to read than Chesterton, has a greater variety of published works than Tolkien, and has a masterful way of weaving Christian principles into his fiction without shoving them down your throat, as I have not seen equaled since his time. So, having just finished his novel Till We Have Faces, and having enjoyed it immensely while being challenged at the same time, I thought I’d recommend it here.

This book is the source of that excellent quote of his which goes thusly: “To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”

The story is that of Orual, an ugly princess of pre-Christian times, who has a beautiful sister named Psyche, and a grudge against the gods for stealing her. It is based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche, but draws from it a much deeper lesson than that of curbing one’s curiosity.

Selfishness masquerades as love, sin is justified into virtue, and denial is called skepticism, while faith is mourned as madness, hope is seen as folly and true love is turned in Orual’s mind into disloyalty. It is a story about how one can be so wrapped up in one’s error that one never notices that it is error. It is a story of extreme jealousy, loss, misery, and finally despair, but it shows that even in the face of this there is hope. There is no sin so great that it cannot be forgiven a penitent heart. It shows the redemptive quality of suffering. And using the ancient gods, Lewis points to the True God, whose ways are above our ways, and whose thoughts are above our thoughts.

While reading, it was fun to try to pick out similarities between Lewis’ writing and Tolkien’s. Orual’s Captain of the Guards, Bardia, has a loyalty and devotion like that of Samwise Gamgee. And when you read of Glome as a web, and “the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men’s stolen lives,” it’s difficult not to think of Shelob or Ungoliant. Even “Ungit,” the name used for Aphrodite, who craves blood sacrifices, is similar to “Ungoliant.”

There are also some threads that run through other Lewis books. Like his way of inventing names, for example. In the preface of the Screwtape Letters, he describes this: “I aimed merely at making them nasty [in the case of the demons]…by the sound. Once a name was invented, I might speculate…as to the phonetic associations which caused the unpleasant effect.” (emphasis added by me.) “Glome” definitely sounds something like “gloom.” There were also themes of “further up and further in” (in this case reversed to further down and further deep) from The Last Battle, God’s splendor affecting different people in different ways, like The Great Divorce, and the idea of loving vs. devouring, seen in the Screwtape Letters.

 

Oh dear. This seems to have turned out rather like the book reports I used to write in college. My main point is to encourage you to do yourself a favor and read Till We Have Faces. And when you do, if you figure out what the title points to in the book, let me know, will you? I still haven’t discovered it.

On the Actual Reading of Books

Women of culture in the days of yore were expected to cultivate their minds as well as their manners by the reading of books. And there is much to be said for reviving that practice today. I do not have research to back up my opinions, but I will lay out a few of the benefits I have found for spending one’s time reading books, rather than, for example, watching movies or TV for entertainment.

Firstly: It improves your vocabulary. It really does. People have told me and my siblings that we sound like we’re from England or some other European country, merely because we are precise in our speech and use longer/more obscure/more precise words. At college, I found I had to explain myself frequently to my fellow students, because they didn’t know words like “callow” or “scintillating” or  “colloquial.” It comes of reading books. And it’s amazing how quickly your vocabulary can slip if you stop reading books for an extended period of time.

Secondly: Scanning a page is a lot healthier than staring at a screen.

Thirdly: You will learn a lot. Especially if you choose your books carefully, but even those dreadful dime-a-dozen murder mysteries contain a decent amount of interesting trivia. And no, you will not learn just as much by watching detective shows on TV. When you read something you internalize it more than if you were watching it…possibly because you can read at your own pace, pause, back up and re-read, almost without noticing it, whereas a show goes along at a predetermined pace, and while your remote does have pause and rewind buttons, are you very likely to use them?

Fourthly: Books are adaptable to a busy schedule. If you sit down to watch a movie, you kind of have to devote two hours together out of your day to that activity. Whereas the nice thing about books is that, when used in conjunction with bookmarks, you can pick up and leave off at your convenience, without worrying about using up electricity, tying up the DVD drive, or missing anything.

Fifthly: Somehow, when you finish a book, you don’t get that feeling that you’ve just wasted a lot of time, like you get when you finish a marathon session of your favorite TV show. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe not. Just sayin’ (to quote a colloquialism).

Lastly: I must say, the idea of having one’s own personal library and having read most, if not all, of the books in it, is appealing indeed.

You Never Grow Up…

Some kids never want to grow up. Others spend their entire childhood looking forward to the day when they will be considered grown-ups, and in their long-awaited early twenties are disappointed to discover that “being grown-up” is not as clear-cut a line as they thought it was.

That was me. I’m still looking forward to being grown up. But now I’m not as sure just how much longer that will take.

Once upon a time, my mother in her wisdom (I’m convinced God gives mothers a particular motherly grace that manifests itself as wisdom. They know things just by virtue of being mothers) said that when you are a little child, you think the world revolves around you, and everyone else is there to take care of you or amuse you. As you get older you come to realize this is not the case, and that there are other people in the world that are possibly of more importance than yourself. But the true mark of being grown up is learning to put others first and yourself last, giving yourself to the service of others.

Hearing that, I was afraid I’d never make it. My fantasies of magically being grown-up at eighteen or twenty-one were now completely shattered. “How old were you when you learned that?” I asked.

“I’m still learning it,” she replied.

I cannot describe how simultaneously reassuring and disappointing that revelation was to me. If my mother, having had roughly thirty more years than I in which to grow up, had not yet made it, I would probably be very old and gray before I could ever claim to be completely grown up. On the other hand, I didn’t have to.

If being grown up is, as in my mother’s definition, a perfection in selflessness, it is something none of us can attain in this life. I am not asked to be perfect. I am simply asked to strive for perfection. In that same way, I am not asked to reach a point where I can consider myself grown up. All I am asked to do is to continue to grow up, to continue striving, all my life.

Am I Feminine Enough?

I have a small confession to make. My Twin cousin and my Best Friend will both probably laugh out loud when they hear this, but it needs to be said anyway. There are some times when I don’t feel very feminine, when, in fact, I feel like I’ve failed at being a good woman. Those are times when I think of the following:

I don’t like to sew and I don’t like to cook.

Oh, I can do both enough to get by just fine on my own, but really, there are other things I’d rather be doing with my time. Like knitting, crocheting, writing letters, making lace, spinning yarn, reading, singing, playing my instruments, and other similar pursuits. Those are interesting. And I do like the kind of sewing that can be done with a needle and thread; it’s just the sewing machine that really bothers me.

But the image of the ideal woman I have before my mind (an image formed, I suppose, through reading books mostly a century old or older), is one who sews and cooks and cleans. And while spinning and lacemaking might be traditionally feminine pursuits, there is very little need for them nowadays, and thus I am wont to consider them unimportant.

I can darn a sock, knit a cable stitch or pick a G lick with ease and tranquility, but ask me to sew a collar or make a meal for a family of seven, half of whom can’t eat gluten, and I will instantly get all stressed out.

So if I’m not good at cooking or sewing, the question is, does that make me a failure as a woman?

Answer 1: Yes. You have definitely failed. You need to immediately get your act together and practice these essential feminine arts. Otherwise how are you going to take care of the family you are going to have someday? If you can’t cook, how will you please your husband? If you can’t sew, how are your daughters going to be able to find anything modest to wear? You need to leave off doing the things you like, because those aren’t important, and get very good at the things you don’t like, because those are the important ones.

Answer 2: No, you haven’t failed. Cooking and sewing are good things to know, but your femininity does not depend on those skills. Besides, it’s not like you can’t do those things at all, but you just don’t like doing them. Look at all those other very feminine things you can do. Most of all, look at who you are—a daughter of God. He doesn’t fault you for not having certain talents or skills. He just cares what you do with the ones you do have. Consider the lilies of the field…

Will you believe it, when I ask myself this question, I answer myself the first answer most of the time, even though I’m fairly sure answer 2 is much closer to the truth.

But then, once upon a time, my mother handed me a sport coat of my dad’s, and two leather elbow patches, and asked if I could sew them on. “It drives me nuts doing that,” she said. “I always poke myself, and it goes so slow—you have to do it by hand, and I can’t even see the holes.”

I was going to tell her I’d do it, when she added,

“I’m dreading it so much that I’d even be willing to trade you some other sewing if you’ll do it.”

Great bonus feature, I thought. My mother agreed to finish two shirts for me (which had already been cut out and partially assembled, minus the hard parts), and in return I would put the patches on Dad’s coat.

And then I thought to myself, “Gee. There are things even Mother doesn’t like to do. I guess you don’t have to be good at everything in order to be a good wife and mother, or even a good woman.”

Advice to Self: God gives everybody a different set of strengths and weaknesses. The trick is to use your strengths well, and for the glory of God. Work on your weaknesses, but don’t fault yourself for them.

Small Sentiment Saturday

As you go through life,

Whatever may be your goal

Keep your eye upon the doughnut

And not upon the hole.

--Anonymous

The Little White Violet

Springtime (I think it is springtime now. All the signs point to it), is a lovely time for looking at flowers. Of course, most of the flowers around this time of year look like this:

One becomes very familiar with Taraxacum officinale subsp. vulgare when one has a little brother who thinks they are pretty flowers and consequently gathers huge bouquets of them, beaming proudly as he presents them to you. From a very early age, mine made the connection that flowers are things that you pick and give to girls you like, most notably (in his case) your mother and sisters. It's very sweet of him. I must admit, however, that in the last two years he has put together some very lovely bouquets with several different types of flowers carefully chosen to go together...usually with a dandelion thrown in there somewhere. But I digress.

Though dandelions are by far the most plentiful, I was convinced that they were not the only kind of flower to be found, so I went looking.

"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."
--J. R. R. Tolkein, The Hobbit 
 

In my mother's garden I found some very picturesque bleeding hearts:

 They were not the something I was after. I wanted something smaller, rarer, more secret.

Then I found this:

It's a wild strawberry. They grow on the north side of the house and are very diminutive, but every year put forth their perennial effort boldly, even producing tiny fruit in June. The fruits are mostly seeds, but one must applaud the attempt. The wild strawberries also, cute in their miniature bravado (how many synonyms can I find for "small"?), were not the something I was looking for.

 

These were.

The white violets had hidden for years under a huge hydrangea bush, very secret, until once upon a time Dad decided that the bush was getting too big for its britches and cut it down. Several times. Only then did the white violets come out into general notice.

They never asked to be recognized. They were quite content to bloom completely hidden by the hydrangeas for a very long time, doing what they were made to do, being what they were made to be, whether anyone noticed or not. And that is what they still do. The only difference is that now their surroundings have changed so that we can fully see and appreciate their beauty.

I know a few very holy women like that. Do you?

 

 

Our Hearts Are Restless

Ever have a one-by-two moment? It’s like a two-by-four moment, only gentler. I hope I’m not the only one who gets these.

Once upon a time I went to Adoration on a retreat in the middle of a busy school year. There was a lot on my mind, and life was getting really crazy. Most of the time I’m excited about Adoration, but this time I really was not looking forward to that Holy Hour, because Adoration meant mental prayer, talking to God and listening for His answers, and that meant thinking, and I was tired of thinking.

I went into Adoration and knelt down, and suddenly an hour had passed and everyone was getting up. I don’t remember what, if anything, happened during that hour, but I noticed, strangely, that I felt rested and refreshed, and thinking didn’t hurt anymore. That was when I learned that Adoration does not always mean mental prayer, nor formal prayer, but sometimes it’s just resting in Jesus.

“Our hearts are restless, O God, until they rest in Thee.” –St. Augustine

Last weekend I was visiting my Twin Cousin (in actuality we are cousins, not twins. She is two months older than I am. But we grew up together, and were thick as thieves when we were younger (and still very close), so when the term was invented, in the hallways back at Community College when we were seventeen or so, it seemed appropriate), and she, being the good cousin that she is, took me to Adoration, because it was handy, so why not?

N. B. If you ever have the opportunity to visit the Adoration Chapel at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Fargo, ND, do it. You’ll be glad you did. It is lovely.

 

So there I was in Adoration, grateful to be there, since I don’t get many such opportunities since graduating, but I hadn’t been notified beforehand that such was our destination, so I was without my rosary, without my Bible, without my journal, all the usual things I take with me to Adoration. It was just me and Jesus. There was a lot on my mind, but somehow I couldn’t get it formed into words. So after a while I gave up and asked what He wanted to say to me.

“Rest in Me,” he said. And that was all. I didn’t want to rest. I didn’t feel I should be resting. Hadn’t I been resting for a long time? Wasn’t there a lot we needed to catch up on? Shouldn’t I be working through some of my problems in this precious time? But no, that was all He said.

It is not good to argue with Jesus. I have learned this. So, reluctantly, like a small child who has been told to go to bed in the middle of putting together a picture-puzzle, I composed myself to rest.

It was only after I got home and picked up Dr. Edward Sri’s book “A Biblical Walk Through the Mass” that I read these words: “John Paul II taught that when we rest in the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist it is as if we become like the beloved disciple who rested on Jesus’ breast during the Last Supper.”

And there was my little one-by-two moment. How often have I been busy with my own agenda in Jesus’ presence, trying to get things sorted out efficiently, when all He wanted me to do was be still and let Him love me? How often have I been busy trying to get things done in the presence of my family and friends, when love was all that was needed?

Beginning the Journey

Once upon a time (for thus begins all journeys), as I was driving down the winding, wooded roads to Mankato for another week of college classes, a song began forming itself in the back of my mind. I don't remember how it went, for I had no way of writing it down or recording it, but I remember that it somehow wove into words the strange thing that was happening to me; that somehow, when I was at home, I felt (and acted, I am afraid) like a little girl, but as soon as I went back to my apartment at college, I was a woman again.

College is reputed to be, beyond a place of learning, a place where teens grow up into respectable citizens, and I think to some extent this is true. When you live out on your own, you are forced to pay your own bills, buy your own groceries, form and maintain your own friendships and fulfill your own commitments, and all these things foster the sense of responsibility that distinguishes the stereotypical teenagers from the grownups.

But what happens after college? Most of us nowadays move back home, at least for a while. Not, as the culture assumes, because we are lazy, but because it is the most financially responsible thing to do while we are paying off the debt we accumulated in college. However, the feeling of being a little girl when I went home for a weekend didn't go away when I moved home for good, and it became very easy to let the responsible woman that had developed in college give way to the immature girl.

The question was this: If I couldn't be a woman around my family, had I really become a woman at all? Or was it just an illusion? Or was it that I had set out on my journey of becoming a woman, and climbed the foothills easily, but was now being faced with the high and daunting mountain?

Having decided upon the latter answer, I decided that no matter how high the mountain looked, I was going to tackle it.

"Be who you are meant to be, and you will set the world on fire."
--Saint Catherine of Siena
 

This blog is the story of my journey. In it I will talk a lot about family, quite a bit about friends, somewhat about vocations, relationships as the subject proves relevant, a bit about music, work, general happenings and probably a multitude of other stuff that I can't foresee, all with a general undercurrent of the good old Catholic faith. For the goal of this journey, ultimately, is heaven.

I am writing for myself, for I cannot claim to be an expert of any kind, but I am also writing for anyone else who might want to come with me. Perhaps we can help each other.

For the title of this blog, a subject over which I have deliberated long without success, I have to thank two philosophy majors from NDSU; the first (who also happens to be my cousin) for suggesting the title, and the second for kindly translating it into Latin for me. Benigne dicis.

Once upon a time there was a girl...