Oscar, age 6, announced today, quite spontaneously, that he’s going to give up ketchup for Lent.
I was impressed.
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].
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Random observation of the day.
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At Disputations:
Reflection on the Gospel story of the boy possessed by a mute and deaf spirit:
It might repay the time, however, to take a closer look at this mute spirit. Here are two lines of thought:
First, courtesy of Fr. John Dear, SJ, in his book Transfiguration, note that the spirit "has often thrown him into fire and into water to kill him." In the New Testament, fire and water symbolize the Holy Spirit and baptism, sources of life. The spirit, though, tries to use them as the means of death. Jesus’ word overcomes these "anti-sacraments" (as I say, this is a line of thought; you’ll have to do the shading yourself), since He has come to bring life to the dead.
Second, the father says that, when the spirit seizes his son, "he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes rigid." Do you know anyone in your own life who has a tendency — perhaps when the subject turns to religion or politics or morality — to foam at the mouth, grind his teeth, and become rigid? Perhaps, and this is offered without the implication that there is a demonic spirit at work, perhaps the way forward in truth with this person is only through prayer (and, as a variant, through fasting).
Lots of meat there… and today’s a good day to sink your teeth into it!
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Today’s Gospel.
Take it literally and it’s one of the most radical things ever said.
We know it so well — Love your enemies — that (like so much of the Gospels) it loses the impact it must have had when first it fell on human ears.
Here it is. Listen to it as if you’ve never heard it before.
Jesus said to his disciples:
“To you who hear I say,
love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
To the person who strikes you on one cheek,
offer the other one as well,
and from the person who takes your cloak,
do not withhold even your tunic.
Give to everyone who asks of you,
and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
For if you love those who love you,
what credit is that to you?
Even sinners love those who love them.
And if you do good to those who do good to you,
what credit is that to you?
Even sinners do the same.
If you lend money to those from whom you expect repayment,
what credit is that to you?
Even sinners lend to sinners,
and get back the same amount.
But rather, love your enemies and do good to them,
and lend expecting nothing back;
then your reward will be great
and you will be children of the Most High,
for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.“Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give, and gifts will be given to you;
a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,
will be poured into your lap.
For the measure with which you measure
will in return be measured out to you.”Whenever anyone says of some modern teaching, "Jesus never spoke about that," this is one of the passages that we can come back to, time and again, and wonder what it means.
Give to everyone who asks of you,
and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back.Applies to a great deal of today’s problems, doesn’t it?
What is mine, anyway?
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Aack! Ash Wednesday is THIS Wednesday!
How did it sneak up on me like that? What are we going to do to observe it in the schoolroom and as a family? I have a Lent activity/coloring book somewhere, if I can find it, but I’d like to do a bit more than a couple of crossword puzzles…
First: explain. On the way to church this morning, I gave Oscar a mini-lecture about Lent. He already knew it was "preparing for Easter." I told Oscar about Friday abstinence and let him know that this year he is six and old enough to observe meatless days. We practiced thinking of things we could eat on Fridays for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and what we could choose if we have to stop at McDonald’s on a Friday.
Next: Mark stayed at church to serve at the K of C pancake breakfast, I took the kids home, and on the way stopped at the drugstore and bought some purple crepe paper to drape on our statuary. Assuning I don’t misplace it before Wednesday.
Next: Resolved to bake brownies or something on Mardi Gras, and to make pancakes in the morning. I read somewhere that they are traditional Shrove Tuesday food. The pancakes, not the brownies.
Next: Discussed with Mark and decided to add (1) a decade of the Rosary before bedtime stories, (2) read through the children’s Stations of the Cross as part of our Friday story time, (3)… deep breath… once a week I’m going to take the kids to daily Mass by myself.
What’ll you do with your kids this Lent? Or what are you giving up?
UPDATE:
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Transmission problems.
The universal, basic question "Where does evil come from?" is answered by the Church with the Genesis story of Original Sin. Evil entered the human race very soon after the first humans were created, when, in response to an attack from outside, humans made a free choice to turn away from the good. Since that first rupture in human nature, its brokenness is passed down through natural generation. Only Christ can, and does, heal the rupture and redeem us.
The story aims at explaining something that we really do know about human beings. We do choose evil over good, or harmful over beneficial, not always but often — and starting when we are pretty young. Nobody on earth has yet managed to figure out how to raise a child so that he or she turns out "all good," never choosing the bad.
The story raises an obvious question that doesn’t have a good answer: How exactly is this brokenness transmitted from generation to generation?
It’s very tempting to think that we transmit it through culture alone. The Church has already specifically condemned this tempting idea as heresy — Pelagianism, to be specific. Original sin is transmitted, somehow, biologically — from parent to child, from body to body. But this seems absurd — that individuals can purely physically pass a spiritual aspect from one to another. How can this be?
The first analogy that comes to mind is the sacraments: these are physical actions that we say give spiritual grace. But unlike generation, they’re not merely physical; they’re social interactions too, cultural rituals. Baptism, confession, marriage, all have words, meaning is transmitted, so the analogy is imperfect. The sacramental graces simply aren’t transmitted the same way that original sin is.
Maybe it’s because, when it comes to eternal, physical human nature, we’re really not "individual" organisms at all. Spread out in time as God sees us, as CS Lewis wrote, we’re really something more like a many-branched tree, one flesh all the way back and all the way forward, all our moving about on earth nothing but the waving of tiny frondlets. Maybe when "our first parents, Adam and Eve, committed the first sin on earth," the rupture came between divinity and all that humanity, between timeless God and the body of humans spread out over the whole dimension of time.
Can this be something like what is meant by "In Adam we all sinned?"
It leads naturally to thoughts of being grafted… onto a Vine. But not to the popular, individualistic imagery of being grafted one single branch at a time. If eternally we’re all one body, particularly in the sense in which we are detached from the source of life, perhaps we have been reattached en masse. (Not so that we lose our capacity to choose whether to remain part of that graft, however. The transcendentalists got it backwards: the bodies of humans are all one, the souls are purely individual.)
But maybe the idea of grafting is a red herring. After all, one of the branches (physically speaking) is what turned out to be the Vine.
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Transmitting our family values.
Mark just closed his eyes and got a big grin on his face. "Listen to that. Isn’t that great?"
"What? The kids yelling?"
"Listen harder. They’re singing Hail, hail Freedonia."
"We must be doing something right."
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AP’s missing pieces.
Last night I had a long conversation with Hannah, later my husband too, about some of the places where traditional "AP" (attachment parenting) philosophy falls short. The spark of the conversation: the book Hold On To Your Kids by Neufeld and Mate, plus a DVD seminar by Neufeld under the title The Power to Parent.
I wish I could get into the details of Neufeld’s thesis in a blog post. Neufeld’s work is, like typical "AP" (Dr. Sears-type) parenting philosophy, grounded in attachment theory. But it picks up where AP leaves off and goes a lot deeper. AP is missing some important stuff.
Where AP has it right is in stressing early sensory bonding with the infant and the young child (through practices like babywearing, co-sleeping, breastfeeding, and caring for your own children); and training your children through modeling the behavior you’d like to see. But these can only get you so far. Once a child hits five or six or seven years old, they need more. And it’s at this point that a lot of AP parents run into behavior problems — relationship problems — that hugs and co-sleeping and gentle modeling can’t solve.
Some think that they just haven’t given enough closeness and love. Some, certain they’ve done everything right, figure that they have an exceptionally "high needs" or "difficult" child — and can’t think what to do next. Some decide that AP was a bunch of bunk and switch gurus from Dr. Sears to somebody else.
Meanwhile, some (not all) people who were raised (horrors!) by mainstream parents who may have spanked, used coercive discipline, put their kids in cribs, etc. etc. etc. seem to have turned out healthy, happy, and whole. How can this be if we’re so certain that spanking is wrong? That breast is best? That cribs are nothing but cages? Etc. etc.
The ends don’t justify the means, so if you’re convinced spanking (or anything else) is wrong, then don’t do it, even if you think it will work. But judging purely on results: Could it be that it’s not quite so simple as "Spanking is bad and won’t work" vs. "Spanking is good and will work?"
Neufeld’s research, according to the book and the video course, indicates there’s six kinds of attachment. And that attachment is the most important factor in their maturation and character development. As children mature, they need to pass through the stages in sequence:
- Through nearness and the senses (easiest but also the most superficial kind of attachment);
- Through imitation and identification (deeper);
- Through belonging and loyalty ("I’m on your side; I want to obey you")
- Through a feeling of being significant, important;
- Through a feeling of love and affection;
- Through being secure in the knowledge that they are known and understood (the deepest and most persistent and mature level of attachment).
AP is great for the earliest two stages, what with all the cuddling and bonding and closeness and modeling ("You can clean up just like me!"), but stops partway through. The stories we hear of successful mainstream parenting, and we all know some, are the stories of people who grew up in a family that fostered, especially, the latter four kinds of attachment as the children grew through older childhood and their teen years. The stories of people whose parents were confident in their work as parents.
The kinds of attachment can, to some extent, be formed independently of each other. It’s not hard to imagine that in a family with very strict rules and harsh punishments for rule-breaking — the kind of stuff that "gentle parenting advocates" and AP experts decry — there might still be a strong sense of belonging and having a place in the family; a strong sense that Dad and Mom are on the same side as the kids; great love; the sure knowledge that the ties among them can never be ruptured.
What Neufeld presents in the book and seminar (at least what I’ve seen so far) provides a lot of what traditional "AP" is missing.
There are other aspects of it that I haven’t touched on. One: By "power to parent" Neufeld means the ability to wield influence (not leverage, not force) on your kids by virtue of their attachment to you, their love for you — many have lost this power over their kids, and it’s not as simple as the continuum between permissive/authoritarian. Nor is it as simple as the superficial kinds of attachment that AP parenting promotes. Two: The whole job of parents is complicated by children’s propensity to attach to other people, not just parents, if it’s what they need to do to maintain emotional and physical safety. Good or bad? Depends who they attach to. A kind, helpful teacher at school? Good. An abusive boyfriend or a neglected young peer? Bad.
I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the seminar sessions.
UPDATE: More thoughts.
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Biting off what we can chew.
Hannah and I compared notes the other day. We each have 3 children; our eldests are first-grade boys. They’re very different kids, and we school them differently. Hannah teaches fewer "subjects" — IIRC, there’s math, reading, copywork, some art study, and music — but spends much more time reading aloud, and reads much richer stories (with a sprinkling of graphic novels, i.e., Tintin comics). I’ve provided Oscar with more "subjects" and done less reading aloud. He has spelling now, and Spanish, and catechism, and art, and history. We did recorder for a while but have suspended it (just too much at once). I have a stack of geography workbooks that I offer occasionally, too. And of course there’s math, reading, copywork.
I like doing many different things, each fairly short. The downside is that our days feel a little bit more chaotic as I try to remember everything on the list. Maybe I’ll switch to doing each subject on fewer days, spending more time per day? Math two days a week, two lessons a day? Still, it seems, so much of these early grade studies are skill building (reading, spelling, math facts, letter formation, Spanish pronunciation) — and short daily practices are supposedly better than longer, less-frequent practices.
Maybe I need to plan lessons by the week instead of by the day, so that the individual days are a bit more flexible.
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