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].

The spirituality of children of divorce.

An interview with Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.

Q. I imagine that children of divorce would also struggle with seeing God as a parent.

A. When I asked them if God is like a father or a parent, their reactions would tell me as much about what they thought about their parents as what they thought about God. One woman said, "God’s not like a parent. God is something smarter than us." Another said, "God seems more distant, like a manager."

Q. How does divorce affect how the children of divorce read the Bible?

A. Let’s take, for instance, the parable of the Prodigal Son. The children of divorce don’t focus on the end of the story, when the child comes home and is welcomed by a loving parent. They focus on the beginning of the story, when someone leaves the family home. For them, it’s not the child who leaves the home; it’s the parent. …One young woman told me, "When I hear the parable about the Prodigal Son, I always think maybe one of these days my dad will decide to come back, too."

…Then you realize that the parable is supposed to illustrate God’s love and compassion and presence — the ever-present, steady, everlasting presence. But children of divorce see themselves in the role of the father waiting for the child to come home; that’s the role of God in the story. They have to be their own protector. They have to be the one waiting in the doorway for someone else to come home. It’s a scary and anxiety-producing place for a child.

Interesting.

The armchair psychologist, seeking an explanation for my conversion to Catholicism and in particular for my marriage to a man from a firmly Catholic family, might point to my experiences as a child of divorce. According to Marquardt, that’s not such a common response; kids from divorced families tend more toward evangelical churches or no church at all.

Mar 28, 2006

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What we’ve lost.

Rich Leonardi visits his father’s boyhood parish church, slated for closing and sale.

Before leaving, I was permitted access to the massive choir loft for a full view of the apse and nave. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I started crying. This church, which at its peak celebrated five Masses during the week and seven on Sundays, which my father and his family spent countless hours serving and worshiping in, probably won’t survive. I grew up less than five miles away. Why had my father never taken ten minutes on a Saturday afternoon to show me this place? And then I felt bitter. We traded heavenly cathedrals like this for barns in the suburbs? We gave up Mozart’s "Requiem," Byrd’s "Mass for Five Voices," and Schubert’s "Mass in G" for guitar-strumming, tasteless "family masses"? Justice must require the payment of a debt attached to the destruction and neglect of so much beauty.

It’s not so much that the guitar-strumming family masses, in and of themselves, were such a bad idea. As a supplement to the heritage we already had — why not? Fads come in, fads go out, that’s life.

But as a replacement for "out-dated" beauty?

I’m Catholic; I’m thirty-one. I’m angry that a whole generation before me threw all that splendor away, and wants me to say "Thank you" that I have guitar-strumming family masses instead. My generation of Catholics has only scattered scraps of Catholic culture, that we have to pull together into a crazy-quilt, something that we can hand down to our children. It’s not clinging to the past when we ought to move forward; it’s sorrowing that our inheritance was squandered. And it’s not an alien experience here in America: what race’s children hasn’t sorrowed, at times, over what was lost when their parents were (by force or by choice) "assimilated?"

Blogger and matchbook-collector James Lileks has written, if I remember right, that he’d give up a year of his life to spend ten minutes walking city streets in the 1940s. I don’t know if I’d give up much life for it, but I have a sort of "Twilight-Zone" fantasy that goes like this: I am walking down a city street and happen to pass a crumbling, graceful church, the sort built to serve throngs of immigrants in the mid-1800s, just as daily Mass begins; impulsively I step in, and find myself transported back to, oh, 1920 or so, just for half an hour.

It’s part of that cultural poverty that I can’t even tell you what I would see there, except for the few things (and they are the crux on which it all turns) that, by the grace of God, have remained. I just wish I could go, and come back, knowing what it’s like to be immersed in the peculiar otherness that was Catholicism in America before it became "American Catholicism."

I hold out some hope of a revival, and I want our family to be part of it. I don’t yet know what that will mean for us, but I’m keeping my eye out for it.

Mar 28, 2006

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“Half-assed but happy: Interior design for the broke and impatient.”

Jenn at breed ’em and weep has learned an important lesson about interior design for the busy mother: Lower your standards.

I know my limits now. Wallpaper removal is not for me. I don’t care what the guys on This Old House say. I don’t have the resources, I don’t have a handyman or a nice Shaker man to seduce. Even if I did seduce a skilled handyman, I wouldn’t have the stamina to keep him entertained for as long as it would take to do my kitchen the right way. And it seems pointless to seduce a half-assed handyman when I can just seduce myself and get the same results.

Read the rest, it’s funny. I’d sympathize, except that the handyman-seduction strategy* has been going well for me.

*Or is that tactics? I can’t remember.

Mar 28, 2006

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“Sharia Catch-22.”

Abdul Rahman, the Afghani who was facing the death penalty on charges that he converted from Islam to Christianity, has been freed for lack of evidence.

At first this sounded like a joke (hasn’t everyone seen the old sign-outside-the-church saw, "If you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?") but it turns out that there isn’t sufficient evidence that Rahman is mentally competent to stand trial.

Or so the prosecutor says. My thought: the Karzai administration had to frantically grasp for some solution that would satisfy the law and the constitution— which, inconveniently, really does make apostasy a capital crime; the large fraction of the population who, inconveniently, consider this to be a good thing; and the American government that backs his.

I take Christian martyrdom — you know, the old-fashioned kind where you don’t take bystanders down with you — pretty seriously. Nevertheless, I was amused by this exchange at Ann Althouse’s blog:

Ann, posting: Was Rahman mentally unfit? "Rahman, [before his release], said he was fully aware of his choice and was ready to die for it, according to an interview published Sunday in an Italian newspaper La Repubblica."

Commenter twwren: It’s Sharia Catch 22. He must be insane becuase any sane Muslim would reconvert to Islam therefore he cannot be executed.

Ann, in update: I like having that part of the law and note that, extended, it would mean that anyone who embraces martyrdom for religion is insane. That’s a useful idea. I hope they propogate it.

There’s more good stuff in the comments at that post.

Mar 27, 2006

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Birds at the feeders.
In order of appearance so far this season, with snow still clinging to the ground and with our yard denuded of vegetation:
- Rock pigeon
- House sparrow a.k.a. English sparrow (male and female)
- Black-capped chickadee
- Common grackle
- European starling
- House finch
- Downy woodpecker (mate-pair)
- Northern cardinal (male)
- Dark-eyed junco
We saw the last four all for the first time within twenty-four hours, which made for a very exciting day. Let. Me. Tell. You.

I’m aware that many feeder fans classify pigeons, grackles, and starlings as pests, a sort of avian squirrel, better shooed away so as not to waste the finch-food on it. At our house, for the time being, every bird is equally exciting.

The pigeons in particular have been fun to watch, because their color variations make it possible to recognize individual birds on return visits. My kids have christened one of them, a mottled gray-white bird, "Snowy Pigeon."

And I had no idea that grackles, up close, were so severely beautiful. I had thought they were all black. But in fact, they are tricolored: the body is black, but the rear end is a deep violet and the head is an iridescent, very dark green-blue.
Mar 27, 2006

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“Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance, kindness and integrity. That is why we have told him if he regrets what he did, then we will forgive him.”

So says Ansarullah Mawlafizada, the Afghanistan trial judge presiding over the case of Abdul Rahman.

That "If" in the quote? It’s a big "if."

Mr. Rahman does not deny his crime, nor does he appear to regret it. He stands accused of converting to Christianity. If he refuses to renounce Christianity — and so far, he has — he faces the death penalty.

There is a possibility that the state will bow to international pressure and release him; but the result of that might well be a lynching, according to this WaPo/AP article:

Senior Muslim clerics demanded Thursday that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to "pull him into pieces"….

"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001.

Take a look at the pics of Rahman in the article: you may be looking at a genuine martyr. Let’s hope not. Let’s hope that thinking Muslims and thinking Christians, however, start sitting up and paying attention.

Mar 25, 2006

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No miracle in Dallas.

Last week in Dallas, there were reports of a possible Eucharistic miracle.

A blessed Eucharistic host in a parish church had wound up on the floor for some reason — reports varied as to exactly why. Per requirements for proper disposal, the priest placed it in a glass of water to dissolve. Then he forgot about it for about four weeks. Later, noticing that it hadn’t yet dissolved, he added more water. He reported that the host turned red and expanded. Kerfuffle ensued.

The Cafeteria is Closed reports that the matter was submitted to the bishop and the material in the glass was tested; results are in: "fungus and bacterial colonies."

Hey, you can’t blame them for checking it out.

Mar 24, 2006

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Just in case.

The patron saint of plumbers is St. Vincent Ferrer.

(Thanks to Jamie of Selkie for inspiring me to look it up.)

Mar 23, 2006

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Homemaking for Engineers.

Incidentally, the last post marks the start of a new topic category, "Homemaking for Engineers." I’m going to phase out the old one, "New Paradigms in Homemaking," on the grounds that "Homemaking for Engineers" is ever so much cleverer and will probably inspire me to post on the subject more often. Besides, it really does describe my viewpoint on the subject pretty neatly.

There are times when I think I should have named the whole darn blog "Homemaking for Engineers."

Mar 22, 2006

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Laundry engineering.

About two months ago we moved into our new house, designed to fit our somewhat unique lifestyle. Among the built-in features is a second-floor laundry room. It’s lighted and spacious, with front-loading machines and space on top of them for folding, a hanging rod and places for baskets, and also room for our diaper changing table.

We assigned a workable, comfortable laundry room high priority. (Consequently the bedrooms are smaller than is usual in new-construction houses.) In the last six months or so before we moved, I developed the expectation that I would cheerfully wash, dry, and fold two baskets of laundry every day, as soon as we moved into the new house with the nice new laundry room. Surely it would be easier than descending two flights of narrow, uneven stairs to the damp and cobwebby duplex basement and climbing up again with full baskets.

Of course, it isn’t exactly easier than what I was really doing, which was letting Mark descend two flights of narrow, uneven stairs to the damp and cobwebby duplex basement, etc. Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out how to fit laundry into my day.

I’m incrementally making improvements in the laundry algorithm. The first step was to stop Mark’s practice of going round the house with an empty basket and collecting tablecloths, dishcloths, bath towels wet diapers, his clothes, my clothes, kids’ clothes, all together into one mixed-up load. I have a generous amount of folding and sorting space in the new laundry room, but not enough to sort that. I bought new laundry baskets and put one in each closet to collect the different kinds of laundry, and decreed a ban on future laundry-mixing.

(Mark: But… I don’t have enough laundry in any of these individual baskets to make a full load!

Me: Good. Laundry’s done for today.

Mark: <blank look>

Me: We just increased our surge tank capacity. Consequently, we have the opportunity for a partial shutdown.

Mark: Ah.)

(N.B. Actually, it wasn’t quite like that, but I’m playing the scene for comic effect here.)

That innovation set the stage for a second one a bit later. I had been putting the kids’ clothes on hangers upstairs in the laundry room, then carrying it down to hang it in their closet on the first floor. But then, after some experimentation, I discovered that the laundry output increased incrementally if instead I carried their clothes down in baskets, fetched kid-size hangers from the closet, clothed the hangers while seated at the kitchen table, and then returned the clothes to the closet rod. I think that this productivity increase is due to the elimination of the bottlenecking step of remembering to carry empty kid-size hangers upstairs. (Fortunately, I have already incorporated clearing the kitchen table into my daily routine, or there would be another bottleneck along this particular process path.)

There’s still plenty of room for improvement. I told Mark this morning that what I really need is a pilot-scale laundry room, and pilot-scale laundry to accompany it. He said I needed direct-something-or-other simulation instead. I forget what, as it was a term I wasn’t familiar with. But as I’m likely to get neither, I guess I’ll have to stick with tinkering with my process on-line. Good thing I don’t have any technicians, or I’d have to buy them a lot of pizza.

Mar 22, 2006

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Making idols. (Not a metaphor.)

Stories of congregations, and occasionally entire mainline Protestant denominations, that have lost touch with their Christian roots are by now old hat. But every once in a while, you come across one that almost serves as its own satire.

Take, for example, the case of the Lutheran church ladies fashioning clay images of pagan goddesses. I think blogger Russell Moore, at the link, put it best:

There’s a time to fight for a restoration of one’s church to fidelity and orthodoxy, and then there’s a time when one no longer has a communion of churches, but a sub-Christian organization.

Sometimes it is hard to tell when that transition has been made. When you get to Asherah worship, I think the ship has sailed.

Um, yeah. See all the little idols right here.

Mar 21, 2006

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“The Well-Connected Mother.”

A wonderful article at Touchstone Magazine by Juli Loesch Wiley. It seems to say it all, concisely, beautifully, about marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, caring for one’s own children.

Men are often tempted to think that their bodies were made for their own use. To a great extent this is true for everyone: Your hands, sir, are yours, they are for your use, and mine are for my use. A man can indulge this illusion of autonomy even further by supposing that even his genitals are there for himself. They’re a source of at times almost compelling drives and intriguing sensations. Even his testes are useful for him, in that the hormones they produce provide certain secondary sexual characteristics he has an interest in maintaining.

But a woman’s body has all these nooks and crannies which are no use to us but evidently were put there for someone else. Don’t get me wrong: We women have our pleasure doodads and our own hormonal self-interest as well. But then, well, there’s the womb. That’s not there for me. I can do without it. It was obviously put there for someone else. The same is true of mature mammary glands, rich with branching ducts and reservoirs, as they are found in nursing mothers and as they are not found in childless females, however nubile and Partonesque they may be.

Read the rest.

Mar 21, 2006

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