This is the day the Lord has made

Sunday morning we had an all-women's class, led by a visiting missionary from New Zealand. Among other things, she talked about inter-generational relationships--about what we can learn from older and younger women, and about how we all too often bracket off people who aren't round about our own age.

This struck a chord with one woman. Tears streaming down her face, she raised her hand and said:

This was a bad week. A dear friend died and we had her funeral yesterday, and another had a heart attack and is in the hospital now. So I called my mother--she's 83--and told her about it. I said life was hard. I said I was having trouble coping with my daughter's divorce. And she said, "I understand."

And all of a sudden it hit me. She did understand. Years ago my sister got a divorce, but had I ever thought about how hard that was on my mother? I had not. Then my sister was murdered--beat to death and shot by her ex-husband, who then shot himself--and do you know what? During that time I'd never thought about how my mother handled that, about what it was like for her, about how she got through it. How could I go all these years just thinking about how I felt and about what I thought? So anyway yesterday, when I called her, I said Mom, I'm having a really bad day.

I mean, she knows bad days, right?

And my mother paused for a second or two, and then she said, "This is the day that the Lord has made."

She never used to say things like that. But it's true. He gives us each day, and we make the best of them we can.

The woman who died last week was 68 years old. She had been married to her husband for 52 years. "That's a lot of time," he said during the funeral service. "It's a lot of time, but it still wasn't enough. Praise the Lord that we'll have more time together in the hereafter."

And, remarkably, that time--which is infinitely longer than this time--will never house a single bad day.

Link Likes

You do read Jennifer, right? She has another great post--this one about reading tea leaves and looking for signs.

Fran is posting about sex again, and what he has to say is well worth reading:

Love isn't just a nice luxury without survival implications. It's a requirement of the human psyche. Without it, we wither and die. Treating others as a mere means to a pleasurable end is the exact opposite of love; indeed, it's the ultimate expression of contempt. It's as life-destroying as love is life-giving.

And Patrick points out a fascinating online archive: The Proceedings of the Old Bailey. (The Old Bailey was London's main criminal court from 1674 through 1913; if you read Dickens or other Victorian lit, you'll see it mentioned repeatedly.)

The Real Mommy Wars

I hope all you moms had a Happy Mother's Day (and I hope the rest of you did, too).

William Ross Wallace was right, you know. The hand that rocks the cradle is indeed the hand that rules the world. It doesn't feel that way, of course. When my three kids were all under four years old, I'd have chosen any number of descriptions of myself--exhausted, frazzled, delighted, baffled, isolated, frumpy, giddy, blessed, overwhelmed--over "powerful."

But I learned very quickly that those three children were determined to mold themselves in my image. From the things I ate, to the tone I used when I spoke, to the books I read and television shows I watched, to the clothes I wore, to how I responded to household crises, criticism, or advice, they wanted to be just like Mommy. Worse, they picked up the underlying attitudes beneath all those surface things and applied them to new situations. Children are way, way smarter than we give them credit for being.

Since I really didn't want my kids to be like me--I wanted them to be like someone much wiser and kinder and braver (ideally Jesus, but at least Jonathan)--I had to make some serious changes in myself, and I had to do it fast. Under any other circumstance, I would have said such a feat was impossible. After all, I'd lived with myself the way I was for 30 years, without achieving much besides eating a more healthy diet, and that was because I married a long-distance runner who cared about things like protein and fat content. (He also kept us under budget by dividing the price of each potential food product by the number of calories, but that's another story.)

But now I was motivated as never before. Now, every trait about myself that I didn't like was getting reflected back at me threefold. Fortunately, that same instant and irritating imitation also gave me instant feedback in how I was doing in the Mommy Makeover (plus that sappy old "Cat's in the Cradle" song kept getting stuck in my head).

I made a lot of progress, but I know quite well that I'm still light years away from perfect. I spent--and still spend--a lot of time asking God to raise my children for me, to make up for the serious deficits I most surely had and still have. I still don't want my children to be just like me.

This kind of power--the ability to mold human beings from the ground up--is frightening. I'm convinced it's why some people don't want children, and why many parents immediately put their little ones in daycare. Who wants that sort of responsibility? Who wants that sort of humbling (not to mention humiliating) hard work? Maybe it's better (we think, either consciously or subconsciously) to let others share the blame for whatever our children become.

Yes, children have individual personalities. Some are compliant, some are mind-bendingly stubborn. Some even have fetal alcohol or drug addictions that make them very difficult to influence. And all children have free will, and grow up to be adults who are responsible for their own attitudes and behaviors, regardless of their pasts.

All the same, parents either give their children a leg up in the "personal development" arena, or give them handicaps that they'll have to struggle to overcome. And we do this almost entirely by the example we set, day by day, hour by hour, trivial little moment by trivial little moment. That's the real Mommy war--the struggle to be someone you'd like your children to imitate.

Good luck, moms (and dads, too). And God bless you. He already has, and he surely will.

Sensory Deprivation

From Cathryn Jakobson Ramin's Carved in Sand:

Memory and attention are suffering, [Duke University neurobiology professor Lawrence Katz] believes, because sometime in the last couple of decades, we've ceased to engage several of our senses. The world has gone flat, brought to us through a computer monitor or a TV screen.

"All television and movies are now designed to activate your attentional mechanism," he remarked. "People are developing a kind of massive attentional disorder, because this stimulation keys into the coarse triggers of your brain. I call it the pornographying of sensation. It makes real life seem pale and timid by association, and we quit paying attention. When it's constant, your brain habituates to it and shuts it off. And imagine, if it has shut out all the loud, dramatic stuff, how easy it is for it to ignore smaller things.

"There are no smells," he announced. "You don't know what anything feels like or tastes like. It's all visual now. Think of a supermarket. Nothing has an odor. We don't like odors. You're supposed to choose your fish or your chicken based solely on the visuals. You're not even supposed to pick up the vegetables to squeeze and sniff them. That's frowned upon. So you miss things like texture, smell and heft. We've become sensorily deprived. It has to do with the ubiquity of visual images--on the Internet, on television, in the movies. We're so saturated with visual images, we quit paying attention to how things smell or sound or feel."

Humans were not intended to go about their lives just using their eyes and ears, Katz explained. "These are inadequate tools for encoding and processing everything properly. The demands on two senses alone are just too great."

Miss me?

It's been a bit hectic around here. In the past week we've purchased a house; painted the two rooms that will contain most of our books (we have way too many books); moved all our worldly goods (mostly books) with the help of many kind friends; cleaned the rent house; and unpacked enough boxes to get by (i.e., the books).

Two of us have had birthdays. Two of us (the youngest two) broke the washing machine by overloading it. One of us (a male) climbed way out on a dead tree limb and got dumped in a bramble patch. One of us (no comment) inadvertently turned the lights off on herself while wandering around in the unfinished and fairly scary basement at 2 a.m., while everyone else was wisely asleep. One of us threw up all over the kitchen--sink, cabinets, boxes, and all--first thing on his mother's birthday. One of us discovered that when the gutters are not clear, the basement leaks during rainstorms.

One of us has been holding down a job during all this, and at any given moment, one to five of us have had head colds. We have not been doing school--since we didn't take time off earlier in the year, I'm calling this our Spring Break. It hasn't been much of a break, but despite all the hard work and the crises large and small, it has been fun. Yesterday we cut stalks of rhubarb and measured the progress of the fast-growing peonies; last night we re-assembled my porch swing while spring peepers sang from the pond across the road. This morning all our colds are better, and around the house some semblance of normalcy seems to be emerging from the chaos.

Time to finish icing a birthday cake.

The Human Family

In a conversation between two priests:

"A man with a family must make sacrifices, impose a discipline on his desires, practice love and patience. We may sin less, yet have less merit to us in the end. ...

"There is no passion in your life, my son. You have never loved a woman, nor hated a man, nor pitied a child. You have withdrawn yourself too long and you are a stranger in the human family. You have asked nothing and have given nothing. You have never known the dignity of need nor gratitude for a suffering shared. This is your sickness. This is the cross you have fashioned for your own shoulders. This is where your doubts began and your fears too--because a man who cannot love his fellows cannot love God either."

"How does one begin to love?"

"From need. From the need of the flesh and the need of the spirit. A man hungers for his first kiss, and his first real prayer is made when he hungers for the lost paradise."

From:

Go, John R. Erickson!

I missed this back when the Pearceys posted it, but it's still relevant.

John R. Erickson, author of the much-beloved Hank the Cowdog series, tells about about a 1985 incident with CBS:

My first impression was that CBS had stayed pretty close to my story. I tried to ignore that they had placed Hank on a chicken farm instead of a cattle ranch, and that the landscapes resembled the Arizona desert, not the Texas Panhandle. Those changes were annoying but not serious.

But after watching the episode three times, I noticed something more disturbing. In my book, Hank lives on a typical family ranch. Loper and Sally May are husband and wife, and Little Alfred is their son. Slim Chance is a bachelor cowboy who works on the ranch.

In the CBS version, Sally May had become the ranch boss. Loper and Slim worked for her, and it appeared that they all lived together in the bunkhouse. Little Alfred had vanished into thin air.

I was stunned. They had taken the family out of my story!

At first, I thought it must have been an accident, but then I watched the other episodes in the “Storybreak” series and noticed that in all thirteen of these so-called “high quality” stories for children, there was not one traditional family with a husband and wife.

The rest is here.

John Erickson, by the way, also writes good non-fiction. Jonathan's reading Through Time and the Valley, which recounts a horse trip down the Canadian (an on-again, off-again river), visiting old battle sites and old ranchers, hearing stories about Comanches and buffalo hunters. 'Course, Jonathan grew up about an hour away from that area, and we still go back to visit his folks, so it's particularly interesting to us.

Losing my Mind

I'm the person who never forgets anything, ever. If anyone in my household loses something, I know where he most likely put it. I can accurately proofread a complicated text or compose an elegant sentence while children clatter around and Jonathan shouts up the stairs, "Can you hurry? We're on a tight deadline!" I wrote a dissertation while rocking a baby. I am so efficient that my mother jokes, "Even her pregnancies only took eight months."

But yesterday Jonathan--the stereotypical brilliant absent-minded professor--remembered that we needed to do something, and I had completely forgotten. Yesterday I lost my house key. Yesterday I went upstairs and forgot why I was there, then went down to the basement and forgot why I was there. Yesterday I forgot to put up a frozen dessert, which would have become a puddle on the table had my boys not noticed and put it away. Yesterday my daughter watched, half amused and half appalled, as I groped unsuccessfully for the word "bag."

As a decidedly verbal person, that last one bothered me most of all. My reliable retrieval device--waiting for a little door in my head to open--had failed me. I imagined a recalcitrant elf holding the doorknob from the inside, smirking while I tugged and tugged.

I don't really think I'm losing my mind--at least not permanently. I know that I'm hip-deep in boxes (we're moving across town this week). I've been distracted and upset by watching dear friends plunge toward divorce--something that I've never before, in my forty years, had to watch. I'm frequently down in Texas mentally, pondering my father's medically mysterious up-and-down health. I have, in short, plenty of reasons to be distracted and forgetful. Things will calm down, or at least I will, and my mind will return more or less to normal.

But you can see why the title of this book caught my attention.

It's quite interesting. The author, Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, set out to discover why her memory was failing her in her forties, and whether she could rejuvenate it. After consulting with dozens of experts, she came up with ten interventions, ranging from vitamins to ballroom dancing, from thyroid supplements to meditation.

And she notes:

[Many] lapses are common in midlife, but there is one type of flub that is universal. Everyone describes the pain of the very public cognitive failure known as "blocking" (or "blanking"), when names will not come to mind and words dart in and out of consciousness, hiding in dark closets just when you need them.

.... In his landmark book, The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter observes that the concept of blocking exists in fifty-one languages and that forty-five of those languages use phrases that include a mention of the tongue to describe a blocked item that felt like it was on the verge of recovery. The Cheyenne used an expression, Navonotootse'a, which translates as "I have lost it on my tongue." In Korean, it is Hyeu kkedu-te-mam-do-da, which in English means, "It's sparkling on the end of my tongue."

However it is expressed, observes Schacter, the individual feels as though he is "in mild torment, something like on the brink of a sneeze." If he finds the word he is desperately trying to retrieve, his relief is considerable.

Poem Sunday: Thompson

In No Strange Land

The kingdom of God is within you

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air--
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places--
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry--clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

--Francis Thompson

Friday Fun: Birthday Cakes

The other day I was admiring these cakes (via Ferferfly), and it struck me:

Thus far my kids have had 33 birthdays. I have, therefore, made 32 birthday cakes for children. (Twice I did not make my child's cake--once we were in the middle of a move and friends made a slug cake for the birthday boy; and once my oven died, but serendipitiously we had a field trip to a bakery that day, and they decorated a cake as part of the tour, then presented it to my son. And, once I made a cake for my niece the year my sister came down with the flu and was too sick to bake. So the total is 32. Soon to be 35. Then 38. Then 41. You get the idea. Lots of cakes.)

My niece's cake was quite an enterprise--my sister had planned to make one of those where you stick a Barbie down in a bundt cake, then ice the whole thing to look like a big skirt. I did it, and it was beautiful (if you like Barbie and big dresses) but it took me forever because Barbie's pink-and-purple icing blouse kept sliding off, rendering her indecent.

Some of my cakes have been successful--the shark cake, the caterpillar cake, the sun cake, the horses-in-a-field cake--and some less so. One year I decided to make petit fours for my daughter's birthday, and they came out a complete disaster (unlike this woman's). I piled them in a heap, piped icing flowers and leaves all over them, and named it the "Flowers Among the Ruins" cake (it tasted good, anyway, and it gave my mother a good laugh).

I have made a Hank the Cowdog cake:














A Komodo dragon cake:













A bear:














An ant:

















A spider (you see the principle here--put licorice legs on anything, call it a bug, and my older son will be happy):














My personal favorite, a sea serpent:














And an "our cats" cake (at my daughter's determined request):

















I am obviously a complete amateur, driven only by love of my children--which is one interesting side-effect of having kids: You end up doing all sorts of things you'd never do on your own.

You are shaping history

From George Wiegel:

...the deepest currents of history are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic. In this way of thinking, history is not simply the by-product of the contest for power in the world--although power plays an important role in history. And history is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production, as the Marxists taught.

Rather, history is driven, over the long haul, by culture--by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.

Intellectual Honesty

People who work mainly with intangible things – ideas, interpretations, theories, reviews, explanations – are exposed to a unique kind of danger. Ideas usually don’t kick back at you in a way that forces you to notice. If you make a mistake in interpretation, usually nothing explodes or catches fire. If an academic has a wrong idea and follows it through, he doesn’t usually lose a limb over it.

The only safeguard, for most people who spend their time on ideas alone, is sheer honesty: they have to be able to admit to themselves when an idea was bad. That kind of honesty is not widely distributed in the human race...

(The rest of Fred's post goes an interesting direction.)

Art: The Secret Handshake

My atheist friends are not going to like this, but hey--it was written by an until-recently atheist:

Art is the secret handshake of the children of God, the inside joke among those with souls. The spark that is ignited within us when we are touched by a work of art is a spark of recognition: the artist has brought us a souvenir from our homeland beyond the material world, the place that none of us should know about, but all of us do. To connect with a piece of art is to connect with the artist as a fellow traveler, to realize that you are both walking the same rocky road, and that he is homesick too. And it matters because true art, art that seeks a connection of souls, makes it harder to devalue and dehumanize one another. It reminds us what it means to be human.

There are some great comments, too, including this one:

Interestingly but not surprisingly, the objective beauty of great music had something to do with my husband's conversion. His recognition that there was an objective beauty in the music of Bach or Mozart led him to ask why there couldn't also be objective truth.

Expelled

We saw Expelled this weekend, and I highly recommend it.

Because of Jonathan's work, we know many of the people interviewed, so the kids enjoyed nudging each other and hissing, "There's Guillermo!" and so forth.

Guillermo Gonzalez is shy; we had a difficult moment when we first met, because I'm shy too, but the kids came to the rescue by announcing that baby spiders had hatched all over their bedroom. Guillermo got down on his hands and knees with them, searching for the source of the problem, and helped remove as many of the tiny critters as we could find. Afterwards he mailed the kids a microscope and a telescope, safely wrapped in bath towels.

They have played with Steve Meyer's children; they have danced at the wedding of Jonathan Wells' daughter; they have clambered around Bruce Chapman's beautifully gardened back yard. They have not met David Berlinski--one of my favorite writers--and have been referring to him in discussions of the film as "the man with the interesting lips."

Why am I telling you this? Because many of the people in the film have been demonized by the press. They are not perfect, of course--who of us is--but they are people of integrity who are trying to protect academic freedom so that they and others like them will be able to follow scientific evidence wherever it leads.

That evidence is not yet complete. One thing the film did not bring out is that some scientists have lost their labs simply because the experiments they were doing were beginning to indicate design. How can science progress if lab work is cut short not because it's poor scientifically, but because it threatens the materialist philosophy of the powers that be?

Related links:

Tom Gilson explains why the Darwin-Hitler link is so sensitive.
Evolution News has numerous interesting posts.