bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Bedtime snack or no bedtime snack?

    At my house, there are five "official" meals:  breakfast, lunch, tea (also known as "tea snack" to differentiate it from "making a pot of tea at other times"), dinner, and bedtime snack.

    Dinner is the most formal meal — the whole family sits down together at the same time and consumes the same food, with jelly sandwiches for kids who don't like the dinner being put off until afterward.  Tea is brief but also formal:  I sit down with the children at 3:30 or so, we have tea and milk and cookies and fruit, and I read some stories aloud.  Breakfast and lunch are informal; Mark and I have breakfast together, whereas the children eat when they wake up later, and lunch is basically sandwiches-and-carrot-sticks-whenever-you-want, help yourself, the bread and peanut butter is on the counter.

    Right in the middle of the formality scale is bedtime snack.  It's a key part of the children's bedtime routine.  Mark is the gatekeeper and master of bedtime snack.   He makes milkshakes, or quesadillas, or apples with peanut butter; he pours cold cereal (almost never used for breakfast in our house) and spoons out yogurt with maple syrup.  He decides whether a particular child needs to eat a portion of uneaten dinner before moving on to the "fun" food.  And of course, Mark has a snack too; without the peanut butter calories, he'd waste away, I think.  (Mark went on a business trip to Italy last week, consumed multi-course multi-hour dinners with lots of wine and a total of ten scoops of ice cream, and lost several pounds.)  Surveying what he and the children polish off in that last twenty minutes or so before bed, I think they easily consume as many calories in bedtime snack as they do at lunch or dinner.  For this reason, Mark's usually pretty careful to make snacks that, while they may be sweet, are reasonably healthful.  

    Of course, with everyone else having bedtime snack for the last five years or so, I've been having one too.  I don't like sweet stuff as much; cheese and crackers or a turkey sandwich, that's the sort of thing I go for late at night.  Healthful stuff!  Sometimes I really am at least a little bit hungry, but I think most of the time I'm not; it's just what everyone else is doing.  

    Some diet people seem to think it's a good idea to have small snacks throughout the day, including right before bed; something about keeping the blood sugar at a stable level.  Others think that snacks are the death of a diet.  I have been experimenting a little bit with the bedtime snack thing; having a small one, maybe 150 calories, versus having, say, two tall glasses of water and going straight to bed.  

    Last week, I felt hungry after coming back from my swimming workout, and had some cheese and tomato on a flatbread cracker; I said to Mark, "Maybe it's a good idea to have a snack when I come back from a workout."  And I did feel pretty good when I went to bed, and not bad when I got up, either.   But last night when I came back from my workout and felt hungry, I decided to skip the snack — I had had a good-sized dinner, it's not like I had to do anything vigorous for the next ten hours, I was going straight to bed — so I drank some water, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.  My tummy rumbled gently, but my muscles were tired enough from the swimming that I was glad to drop right off to sleep.  I woke up feeling wonderfully light and empty inside, really ready for breakfast.

    Having made a few comparisons like this over the last few weeks (in that case, after-workout fasting vs. after-workout snacking), I'm just about ready to quit bedtime snacks for good.  I am pretty sure that I feel better when I wake up after a twelve-hour fast than when I wake up after a seven-hour fast.  I also seem to be satisfied with a smaller breakfast, at least in the case that I have a light "second breakfast" planned for midmorning.  

    The ritual of bedtime snack is pretty strong, though, which is a good thing, not bad, since it's a time of family connection.  I've been avoiding it by staying busy while Mark's making food for the children, or by whisking MJ up to bed immediately after she finishes hers.  I should probably stock up on some herb tea or low-sodium bouillon or something, so I can come back and spend that time with my husband and children, finishing out our day.

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  • Thought crime goes both ways.

    Here’s the story, big in Minnesota, about the Valleyfair amusement park beating. On the fourth of July, a gang of thugs brutally beat up a man who was defending his teenage daughter from unwanted attention.

    After mug shots of the black suspects were made public, the case generated intense public reaction in online blogs and news sites and was debated on local talk radio shows after many callers mistakenly believed the victims were white. The Scott County attorney’s office received numerous calls urging that a hate-crime charge be filed until Ciliberto announced last week that the victims and suspects are all black.

    Come on, doesn’t the “ick factor” in the following facts argue eloquently against having a special category of crimes known as “hate crimes,” in which certain cherry-picked motives and states of mind — real or perceived — mean harsher penalties?

    When the public believed the victims were white, “numerous” people called for harsher penalties under hate-crime laws.  When the public found out the victims were black, the calls for harsher penalties went away.

    I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly enjoy living under laws and public attitudes that mean the same guy would get an easier penalty for beating up a black family than he would for beating up a white family.

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  • Bread.

    I tried Greg’s recipe in my bread machine, using the standard settings for wheat bread plus the programmable extended rise.  Tasted great, but it’s still really dense — looked like a brick.     I still have the recipes that came with the bread maker to try, but I figure I’ve got plenty of time to get this right, so I’m going to change one thing at a time.

    Hannah was over for dinner last night; she has been baking bread for years, and she judged that it needed more kneading.  So the next thing I’m going to do is use the same recipe, only restart the machine after it finishes the first kneading so that it kneads twice as long.  

    I warned my family that I was probably going to make a lot of mediocre loaves of bread before I got good at it.  The faster they eat it, the faster I’ll get better.

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  • Regimen confusion.

    I was kind of embarrassed to keep posting about eating, because I feel like I'm belaboring the points quite a bit, but going back over my hit counts and comments, I see that the topic is easily one of the most popular I've ever chosen to write about.  Oooooookay.  I don't want to turn this into a diet blog, but I'll give you all more of what you want, at least for a while.

    I've been clicking through some of the posts on the No-S Diet bulletin board.  Meanwhile, one of my close friends followed the link from my post a couple of days ago on it and was intrigued.  She hates measuring, counting, keeping track of stuff, and already makes almost exclusively non-junk choices, so it sounded like a perfect idea for her to try, she said.  I stayed with her for a couple of days this week while Mark was out of town, and we discussed it a lot.

    I should have known better!  Now I am suffering from regimen confusion. 

     I spent a day and a half (off and on, we had other stuff to do of course) talking to my friend about the ins and outs of the No-S Diet:  why it might work for her, how best to tweak it for her particular personality and tastes, how it might be just the thing for me as a maintenance regimen or when I get sick of tracking calories, the psychology of why it might work, the situations under which it wouldn't work, etc. etc. etc.  Now, even though I am not following the No-S diet — I am most certainly, for example, having snacks every day, and taking seconds of at least some of the stuff on the table — I keep catching myself thinking as if I am trying to follow it.  "Don't snacks!" my brain is saying to me, as I am about to consume my 153-calorie afternoon mini-meal (sliced tomato and one ounce of fresh farm Tilsit cheese on a Wasa brand cracker bread).  "No seconds!" my brain is nagging, as I am helping myself to another spoonful of Brussels sprouts after cleaning my plate and deciding I wasn't quite full.  

    This has happened to me before:  failure to concentrate on my existing plan, getting sidetracked by some other attractive idea.  It is not that the alternative plan is a bad idea.  I alluded before to my thoughts that the No-S regimen might be a very nice maintenance plan for me, when I decide to stop counting and tracking calories and portion sizes for some reason.  The problem with having two different plans in mind is that one tends to try to follow, at any given moment, the plan that restricts you least right now.  So… "Should I have a midafternoon snack?  Of course!  I should have a carefully measured snack to keep my blood sugar steady and keep from getting hungry later.  After all, even though the No-S diet says no snacks, I am not on the No-S Diet!"  Later:  "How much should I put on my plate?  Ooh, the No-S Diet says I should put as much on my plate as I possibly think I could eat, and it doesn't matter if the stuff is calorie-rich as long as none of it is a sweet…" Still later:  "Saturday!  The No-S Diet says I should indulge if I want!"  Monday mid-morning:  "Snack time!  Good thing I'm not on the No-S Diet!"

    It strikes me that this is a general problem with people who have been on lots of different diet regimens.  The thing is, all reasonable diet regimens (pretty much) have some balance between contexts when you must restrict yourself and contexts when you may indulge:

    •  Weight Watchers:  Indulge in low-point-value foods; restrict high-point-value foods. 
    • Low-carb:  Indulge in meats, cheeses, fats, and green vegetables; restrict starches, fruits, and sweets.
    •  Low-fat:  Indulge in carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, even sweets; restrict fatty proteins and fats.
    •  No-S:  Indulge on weekends and special days and on one plate at each meal; restrict between meals.  
    • What I've been doing:  Indulge in whatever type of food I want (since I don't like junk much), restrict amount of food.

      But the choice of contexts differs from regimen to regimen.  So you can't very well mix two of them, or you might wind up not restricting at all.  Deciding you're a low-carber when someone plops a twelve-ounce medium rare grilled steak in front of you (with a pat of butter melting on the top; I'll take the salad thank you, but hold the potatoes please, I'm doing Atkins!), and then deciding you're really a low-fat dieter the next morning with a giant bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and skim milk, plus some toast and jam and a banana…. um, this is not going to result in weight loss.

    This has been covered before in Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding:

    Call up Jude to complain about diet failure, who says write down everything you've eaten, honestly, and see if you stuck to the diet.  Here is list.

    Breakfast:  hot-cross bun (Scarsdale Diet — slight variation on specified piece of whole-wheat toast); Mars Bar (Scarsdale Diet — slight variation on specified half grapefruit)

    Snack:  two bananas, two pears (switched to F-plan as starving and cannot face Scarsdale carrot snacks).  Carton orange juice (Anti-Cellulite Raw-Food Diet)

    Lunch:  potatp (Scarsdale Vegetarian Diet) and hummus (Hay Diet—fine with baked spuds as all starch, and breakfast and snack were all alkaline-forming with exception of hot-cross bun and Mars: minor aberration)

    Dinner:  four glasses of wine, fish and chips (Scarsdale Diet and also Hay Diet — protein forming); portion tiramisu; Toblerone (pissed)

    I realize it has become too easy to find a diet to fit in with whatever you happen to feel like eating and that diets are not there to be picked and mixed but picked and stuck to, which is exactly what I shall begin to do once I've eaten this chocolate croissant.

    (Thanks, Amazon Search Inside Feature.)

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  • Hungry?

    Not so much. 

    (Yeah, it's another food post, bear with me)

    I'm beginning to notice something different at dinnertime.  Remember, I've been doing straightforward calorie- and volume-restriction for a couple of months, practicing being hungry.   Not taking seconds at meals, having — if hungry when the time rolls around — two or three very small planned snacks.  Lots of water.  

    The last few times I ate dinner, I've been noticing full.  Even before I finished my plate.  Take last night, for example.  I was having dinner at Hannah's house.  She'd served spaghetti and meatballs, with plain steamed carrots and plain steamed cabbage on the side.  The sweetness of the plain vegetables complemented the acidic tomatoes perfectly, and the meatballs were really good ones, a lovely texture from being browned in the oven, spiked with onion and filled out with good coarse wheat cracker crumbs.  I carefully filled half my small plate with cabbage and carrots, eyeballed about 3/4 of a cup of pasta, counted out four meatballs, and spooned the tomato sauce over everything.   I was satisfied that I'd dished out a reasonable-sized meal, and planned to enjoy the whole thing.

     The vegetables were so nice — really, I love plain cabbage and plain carrots — that I ate them all first before starting on the pasta dish, which tasted just great to me.  But about halfway in — I realized I had had enough.  It felt like — like — like the sensation of just finished my third plate of Thanksgiving dinner.  Not quite so intensely, more quietly persistent, but it was definitely there.  I don't remember ever feeling this sensation in my life unless I was on, like, my third plate of food (and of course, then, it feels much crummier).   There it was:  the clear signal "Time to stop."

    Of course the brain rebels.  I had about three more bites fueled by "But I get to have the whole plate!  I already told myself I could!"  Somewhere in there, though, I got a handle on it and decided I wasn't going to eat any more.  I had a glass of water.  And that was it for dinner.  Afterward, the "full" sensation went on getting stronger, almost to the point of discomfort.  I kept thinking "Did I eat a few extra servings without noticing it?"  

    I had another day, a little before that, when I made a pizza for the kids.  I figured I should have about a fifth of the pie, which was Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple, which would be about 250 calories, plus a generous serving of vegetables.  So I cut myself two small slices.  Well, after ONE I was full.  I had a few more bites of the second slice ("Darn it, I calculated that I should have two pieces, I'm going to have two pieces") before recovering my senses and telling myself I should put it away, and if I was hungry before bed I could have the rest of it as a bedtime snack.  (I'd say that this worked really well, except that it might only have worked because Milo ate the pizza before I could.)

    The last few weeks have been weird, when it comes to hunger signals.  For a while I was having days where I wasn't hungry at all, until I forced myself to eat a planned meal or a planned snack; then, about 20 minutes after that, suddenly becoming ravenously hungry.  I waited the sensation out, reasoning that it must be some kind of illusion since, after all, I had just eaten.  It lasted a while and then went away, only to reappear after my next meal.  Bizarre!  Fortunately, that seems to have stopped.

    I hope the feeling-full thing continues, because if it does, it's obviously going to help.  That is, if I can continue to resist those impulses to ignore it and keep plowing through my apparently-over-generous allotted portions.

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  • Hey, speaking of diets…

    …here's one designed by an engineer, and unsurprisingly, it sounds quite sensible to me (and similar to my Don't Eat So Damn Much Diet):

    The No-S Diet

    Thanks to the person who e-mailed me with this one!

    (Personally, I would engineer the diet to allow for more than three meals a day, particularly for nursing mothers, as long as they are eaten with meal-like behavior rather than with snack-like behavior.)

    ADDED NOTE TO MY HUSBAND JUST IN CASE:  We have small children.  No shovelglove in the house.

    ADDED AGAIN:  Having perused a little more, I can recommend the whole constellation of sites by this guy as an excellent way to waste your lunch hour.

    ADDED:  Jennifer from Et Tu posted about her experience with the No-S Diet last month, and she thought it should be called the "Conquering Gluttony" program.  Hmmm!  

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  • Asking for trouble?

    If you followed my six-part series on the twenty pounds I lost in the last ten weeks — and the 19 I still have to lose before I reach my goal — you might think I'm crazy for this:  I just bought an automatic breadmaking machine via Craigslist.  (I paid $50 for it, $10 of which was an incentive for the very nice seller, who lives an hour away, to meet me near my house instead of near hers.)

    But really, it makes sense.  We spend something like ten to fifteen dollars a week, sometimes more if there isn't any on sale, on expensive high-quality whole wheat bread, most of which is eaten by children.  The kids eat an enormous amount of toast for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch, and often toast or sandwiches for snacks.  I put bread and butter on the table once in a while too, because it's quicker than making rice or potatoes.   And I almost always serve sandwiches when it's my turn to make lunch for my friends' kids.   

    I don't bake my own bread because, um, I don't feel like I have the time.  I make pizza dough, and I make quick breads, including an Irish soda bread that is sturdy enough to make sandwiches with; I'm hoping the bread machine offers a way to get yeast bread with the kind of time commitment I'd expect from a quick bread.  

    The only reason I haven't bought one yet is because I've been avoiding bread for years now, and I always feared that a bread machine would entice me to eat bread.  So… now that I am not doing the low carb thing, and am concentrating my efforts on reasonable portions of all kinds of food, and am having unprecedented success, I thought… maybe it's time to welcome homemade bread into my house again.

    I still have about 5 loaves of store bread in the house that I want to use up, so it'll be a week or two before I'm ready to try it out.  This gives me time to find a place to keep the darn thing and to collect some recipes.  So… if you know a good first-timer bread machine recipe, especially a 100%-or-nearly-so whole wheat recipe, please share.  Double points if you can tell me how to manage soaking the flour for 12 hours, Weston A. Price style, before starting the machine.

    UPDATE.  Greg gives me a recipe in the comments. 

    Per most of the advice I've read online, I used a packaged bread machine mix (a Hodgson Mill "honey wheat" bread) for the first loaf.  It turned out pretty good.  A little bit lopsided.   I guess I'll make French toast for breakfast and then try Greg's recipe tomorrow.

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  • Contemplating remaking the chicken and noodles.

    My mother was not much of a cook, but there were a few things she made with great care and justifiable pride in how they turned out.  One was homemade macaroni and cheese.  Another was cabbage rolls (from a recipe inherited, in a sideways sort of way, from my grandmother’s Hungarian-American best friend).  A third was a dish we called “chicken and noodles.”  I hardly ever make it, because of the years I spent eating more-or-less-low-carb, but it’s really fantastically homey and delicious.  It’s really a chicken noodle soup made with so many noodles that it’s not soupy anymore.  This is how my mother did it:

    Start with a package of bone-in chicken breasts, the size that usually contains two breast halves.  Cover with water, bring to a boil, and simmer about an hour or a little longer until the meat is done; don’t overcook.  Remove the chicken, allow to cool, and pick the meat from the bones, discarding the skin; set aside in the fridge.  Return the bones to the pot; if there is time and you would like, you can simmer them longer to enrich the broth before the next step, but it’s not necessary.  

    Add to the pot some chopped onion, diced carrots, and chopped celery; as much as you like, and in the size pieces you like.  My mother didn’t use much; maybe one or two carrots, one celery stalk, and a small onion, all in small dice.  I like to keep the onion small, but I use plenty of carrots and celery.  Continue simmering until the vegetables are as tender as you like them.  Remove the bones.

    Now add a whole lot of wide egg noodles — like, as much as will fit and remain submerged.  Raise the heat to a low boil and stir until the egg noodles are cooked, adding water (or chicken broth if you’ve got it) if necessary. Add the reserved chicken meat back to the pot and heat gently to warm through.  Turning it down to low or even turning off the heat, covering the pot, and letting it stand until the noodles get downright mushy is an optional step that, in my opinion, enhances the dish.

    Serve in a bowl with salt to taste and plenty of black pepper.  I am returned to some of the more pleasant memories of my childhood if I also add a generous handful of Premium brand saltine crackers.

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    I bring all this up because I am contemplating monkeying with the recipe.  

    Mark’s not home for dinner tonight.  I thought chicken and noodles would please my children, and I thought maybe this might be a good day to try to make the recipe a little more healthful.

     I couldn’t find whole-wheat wide noodles at the grocery store (they probably have them at the co-op, but I didn’t feel like going there yesterday), so I bought Ronzoni brand whole wheat blend lasagna noodles, thinking I would break them up into random pieces.  But the sight of the lasagna noodle box has me wondering:  Could I make a layered-noodle casserole out of this stuff? I think I’m going to try it.  I need the broth-veg-chicken mixture to be chunkier, so either I’ll use lots of celery and carrots, or I’ll augment it with some frozen peas, which will probably turn it into something a little more akin to a chicken pot pie than to Mom’s chicken and noodles.  I think I’ll have to bake it longer than one would bake a lasagna, to ensure that the whole thing gells up.  There will be no cheese; I could maybe add an egg custard, though, to firm it up a bit, and maybe stir a tablespoon or two of flour into the sauce as well.  

    I will let you know how it goes.

    UPDATE?  Okay, I didn’t add any egg and I didn’t add any peas.  I boiled the broth-veg mix until it reduced by about half (which made it lovely, very rich tasting!) and stirred in 2 tablespoons of flour.  I layered the lasagna noodles in a 9×9 Pyrex pan with the solids (veg and chicken — no bones of course) and then poured the liquid over the whole thing.  I covered it with foil and baked it for an hour.

    My verdict:  It turned out very tasty and with the right texture.  The whole wheat lasagna noodles worked well.  But I think it would have been just as good if I’d simply broken the noodles into the pot and cooked them till done, then covered the pot and let them sit.  Baking it seemed like an unnecessarily long step.

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  • Hospitality.

    Fantastic two-part post at Et Tu, Jen.  (Follow the link at the bottom of her post to get to the second part).  The post is a few weeks old; but the story has been continuing in several later posts.

    It’s about what happened to her when she reluctantly invited the neighborhood children in to tea.  From the second part:

    One of the things that stood out is that a few of you referred to me as having “that” house — you know, the house in the neighborhood where all the kids hang out after school, where there’s a constant flow of people in and out the door, where mom always has some yummy munchies on hand. I told my husband about all the great comments, and said in disbelief: “People seem to think that I’m ‘that’ mom with ‘that’ house…and I think they might be right!”

    I know I sort of touched on this in my last post, but let me just say this again: nothing could be more unlikely. [People who know me personally are nodding vigorously at their computer screens right now.]

    (The followup post about DISHWASHER CHAOS is especially good, and contains some lessons I really need to learn myself.)

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  • Midwife story.

    In the Christian Science Monitor:  Brief but well-written profile of a midwife who serves the Amish community in Lancaster County, PA, recently cleared of practicing-medicine-without-a-license charges.  It’s the kind of positive midwifery story you could forward to your in-laws, if you know what I mean.

    An aside:  One of the great things about the blogosphere (and the Internet in general, I guess) is that from time to time you learn which print publications deliver a good deal of top-quality writing and reporting.  I’ve been nothing but impressed with the articles I’ve read at the Christian Science Monitor, for instance — a publication I probably would never have picked up at a newsstand.

    (Selection bias is always a possibility.  Maybe people tend to link to the CSM only for its good stuff, ya think?  Still, I think I’m going to start reading more of its articles and find out if the writing is consistently as good as the non-random sample I’ve gotten through links.)

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  • This post is really about media, family, and privacy, not politics.

    It is way, way, way too early for me to be writing with any interest about the presidential election, so understand that my link to this post by Gateway Pundit is not because I think the information there is strongly relevant to who’s-gonna-be-a-better-president.

    I just think it’s interesting that, after all this time and media attention, and especially after the increased attention that Senator Obama’s candidacy has brought on the subject of racially blended families, that  this is the first time I have ever heard that Senator McCain and his wife have one daughter whom they adopted from Bangladesh in 1991.

    According to the U.S. Department of State, last year Americans adopted more than 20,000 children from other countries; roughly four-fifths of those, from non-European countries.  Although the number has dropped recently, apparently driven by policies in China and Russia, the number has been around 20,000, plus or minus a few thousand, for the last several years.  That’s a big increase from 1991; when the McCain family took in Bridget McCain, she was one of about 8,500 foreign children adopted by Americans.   There are roughly four million babies born in the U. S. per year, by the way.  

    Mixed-race families — whether made that way by ordinary marriage and childbearing, or by adoption — are growing in number, and they are going to be of growing importance in our national struggle to make sense of race.  I think it’s interesting that I’d never until now heard of Senator and Mrs. McCain’s adopted daughter.  You’d think that it’d have made an interesting two-candidate story when paired with the well-publicized narrative of Senator Obama’s parents and grandparents, but I’ve never seen any story that mentioned both candidates’ blended families.

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  • Question and answer.

    Lovely post at Light and Momentary about knitting, and giving, and praying.  Really.  Go read it right now.

    I don’t know exactly what I was expecting when I started knitting these socks, but it was not a rapid and dramatic answer. 

    Rapid and dramatic answers:  for me, few, but memorable.  They have never come when I expected them, or even when I hoped for them (in the sense of:  Gee, every once in a while I seem to receive a rapid and dramatic answer.  Maybe this time I will too!) Just enough, though, that I almost always have in the back of my mind:  yes, even this improbably crazy hope could be granted, even this lost cause could be moved just a little bit farther, even this long stony silence could be broken, even this tiny offering could increase an already-infinite treasure.   It’s a huge temptation to believe that prayer does nothing outside of the self.  The gift of even one “rapid and dramatic answer” — besides the answer in its own time — is the memory:  No, wait.  At least once, I know Someone was listening and responded to me.  With the knowledge that it’s not a thing you deserve, not a thing you earn, that it’s a gift — then you can keep speaking, keep asking, keep offering, not so much in the hope of a response but in the awareness of a Listener.


    One of the things about Catholicism I particularly like is that our oral tradition is full of extremely dramatic answers to prayer, even to the point of, um, melodramatic ones.  Kooky-sounding ones, even.  Of course none of them are required belief or even required reading — if it doesn’t help you to believe in St. Rita’s festering stigmata then fine, just go about your business — but having all those stories in the back of your mind does, I think, insulate against the notion that the only kinds of “answer” you should hope for, and ask for, are invisible ones. 

     Not that it’s small potatoes to have God answer your prayers by, say, increasing your fortitude, or nudging you toward forgiveness, or granting a grace.  

    More that, we live in bodies, in a physical world, among other humans, and it’s perfectly all right to hope that answers come to us visibly.  A sight that shocks us into perspective so that our own complaints seem small and we can bear up under them; an spoken message that displays that person’s human weakness and awakens pity, the midwife of forgiveness; a token, some object, that passes into our hands, a thing that is in some way exactly a manifestation of the asked-for grace, a thing that we can turn over in our fingers and read the clear message:  I was listening.

    Can we go too far in our expectations?  Yes, most of us can, I think, but more by expecting in the wrong way than by expecting too much.  If you fall into the answer-me-or-else trap, then you’ve got a problem.  I imagine, though, that some of the great mystics (St. Teresa of Avila comes to mind) were granted the gift of a conversational relationship with God — something more nearly face-to-face — one where they could “expect” responses to everything they ask.  (If you have read the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who had a special love for her “older sister” St. Teresa, you know the sort of audacious expectation of familiarity, of intimacy, that I mean.  On one level it’s charming and childlike in St. Thérèse, but there’s a real edge to it too.)  

    I guess you could also go wrong by tending to see a message in everything.  As far as I know, there’s no reason not to believe that there’s no such thing as a coincidence and everything is connected and woven together in a well-orchestrated Plan.  (Me, I think that probably lots of things are unimportant details, but that it’s pritnear impossible from a human perspective to know which ones are truly unimportant.)  But even if there’s no such thing as a coincidence, and that means that you’re constantly receiving a stream of personal Messages, um, well, then, so is everybody else so don’t let it give you a big head, OK?  Or worry you a lot, either.  It’s easy to see how certain personality disorders interact with a reasonable belief in the efficacy of prayer to produce serious trouble.  (There’s nothing specially destructive about religious belief here. Personality disorders interact with all sorts of reasonable beliefs to produce serious trouble.  Witness the interaction between OCD and standard hygiene recommendations.)

    It seems to me that the proper attitude toward “answers,” whatever their form is to regard them as gift, pure gift, like all graces.  Or maybe not exactly like all graces… because answers to prayer are unusual in that, by definition, one must “do something” to merit them.  That’s “merit” only after a certain fashion:  By definition, an answer is the kind of free gift you do not get unless you first ask.

    ADDED:  I recently came across this post at Et Tu Jen which is related.  Key quote:

    …to be a Christian is not to make God part of your story, but to realize you are part of God’s story.

    Worth reading the whole post, which is about trying to read “messages” into everyday life.

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