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].
I had to drive about half an hour from my in-laws’ place to find a cafe (a Panera) with free wireless internet access. Now that I’m here, Earthlink is apparently down and I can’t check my e-mail.
Oh well, the sourdough bread is good. Off to Borders to spend my gift certificates! And a merry Christmas (yup, it’s still Christmas) and a happy new year to all.
That comment posted by Joe K. in response to this great post by J. D. at Math And Text. J. D. writes:
[C]ontrol, in education, is almost always placed before truth, no matter what good comes out of the system. Withholding or curtailing the truth and nothing but the truth is a time-honored strategy of gaining control and power across history and across the globe.
Am I being hyperbolic? Here is a ridiculously mundane example:
About a year or so before my line segment battle, I was riding the train home from Boston (on the Newburyport line–last stop). Across from me I watched and listened to a man and his young daughter (about 6 years old, I would say). The daughter asked incessantly about the bathroom on the train. The father insisted over and over that there was no bathroom on the train and that she would just have to wait. Not having children at the time, I made what seemed like a ridiculous gesture. I leaned in and told the father that there was indeed a bathroom on the train and that it was in the front car. He whispered, "I know."
Control. If you’re a parent, it can be adopting ridiculous positions that are essentially lies in order to gain the upper hand. If you’re a teacher, an administrator, a student, it doesn’t matter. Control.
This really hit home. Come on, parents — isn’t the temptation huge, sometimes, to out-and-out lie to your kids so that (a) they’ll obey you (b) they’ll stop bothering you about whatever it is (c) they’ll stop asking questions…. you name it?
I’m guilty of the following lies:
I’ m sure I could come up with more. And of course this Christmas season, who can forget the power of Santa? (We don’t do Santa. Never have, never will.) My mom loved the ability to make kindergarteners in her classroom behave by invoking Santa; she told them she had his home phone number.
Good post. I hope that commenter Joe’s astute observation stays in my mind and helps me be tempted less often.
At finslippy, and in the comments. New words include "plander" and "jetinate."
One of my favorites has always been "prinklepined," which was Oscar’s word for the itchiness he got from hiding up in the juniper tree. I got all prinklepined. Doesn’t that sound exactly right?
Sorry for the nonexistent posting for ten days. PC in the shop, and I’ve been groggy and sick. More later, I promise.
… to have LOTS of really amazing commenters, instead of just a few. Amy Welborn cites an example of one of hers.
Keep it up, thou few and faithful readers!
Ann Althouse has a moving and personal post about December 9, 1980. There’s more there than meets the eye, for those of you who don’t particularly care about the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, because it meant something very important to her. Looking back on it, it is a story of conformity and nonconformity, of insecurity, and something a little universal in modern womanhood:
On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn’t even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can’t remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article…
How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!
I was especially sensitive about fitting in, because I was six months pregnant with my first child, and I worried that this experience was tearing me away from the career I had spent the last two and a half years studying to begin. I was 29 years old, older than most of the other law students. I doubted any of them had studied fine arts, my undergraduate major. With my age, my art school background, and my pregnancy, I was imposter, constantly threatened with exposure. I couldn’t walk out on these people and go be with the mourners. I only watched the mourners on television and felt doubly sad.
I can relate to the "imposter" feeling, "constantly threatened with exposure." And the almost embarrassing obviousness of a pregnancy in a place where pregnancies are not often seen. I was in an engineering program, not law school. I went a different way from Ann — my pregnancies and children did, eventually, tear me away from that career I’d sought — and I’m not sorry, for myself. But I do feel a certain warmth towards people like Ann, whose success hasn’t managed to tamp down their humanity.
You’d think I’d always be the cheerleader for ditch your career! stay home with your kids! I don’t know any details about any particular person’s decisions, how they affect her kids, etc. Anyone who asks me knows how much I worry about children who spend a lot of time in day care and other institutions. But I admit to a certain amount of pleased pride in a woman who (a) doesn’t let a desire/calling for a career prevent her from raising a family (b) braves that feeling of impostership, that fear of exposure, that Ann writes about, and manages to overcome it.
It’s not so much that I am pro-supermom or anything. That’s hard, and rarely worth it for long! It’s more that I am so pleased when those glassed-in, walled-in worlds that can pretend they are so remote from families, from love, from babies, from children — are forced to bend a little from the weightiness and import of families, love, babies, children, where the real work of humanity takes place.
That, and that I am one of those, or she is one of us. I went home, after a while. But oh, how I remember what it was like for those brief (or were they long?) years of living in two worlds, going to graduate school, coming home to my child, lugging the pregnant belly back and forth. Trying to figure out where my real home was, or whether I was some kind of dual citizen. In the end I chose for my children, but by that time the same choice was also for me. I finished my degree, and that was enough for me of a certain measure of success: that me, the imposter, and the pregnant belly that gave me away, had come up against the university and won.
Amy Welborn has a series of posts sparked by the news that a particular mega-church in Kentucky decided to close for Christmas to give its staff the day off. Here’s her first post about the KY church. Here’s a second one, in response to a post by a Canadian Presbyterian who blogged his disappointment that his own church would have no Christmas Day service. Here’s a third, highlighting commentary by an "excellent Scripture scholar."
When I first read these posts and the news articles that accompanied them, I was immediately sympathetic to the Protestants who criticized the churches for not having Christmas services.
Then I realized that the criticism was not so much because they weren’t having Christmas services, but because Christmas happens to be on a Sunday this year. The criticism was mainly: "Hey, they canceled Sunday services because of a holiday!" And certainly that is a problem.
I thought that was weird. Don’t Protestants usually go to church on Christmas Day, whatever day of the week it falls on? Or is that just a Catholic thing? (Late Christmas Eve services count as Christmas Day services, btw, under the same logic that lets us go to Mass on Saturday evening to keep our Sunday obligation.)
Let me tell you, even after thirteen years, I still have a lot to learn about being a Christian in the United States.
Good post on guilt at Family Scholars Blog:
For a long time in our culture we have focussed on adult rights and freedoms, which strangely enough carry new burdens of responsibilty for the child. The wise, resilient, and oh so competent children of divorce, are expected to cope and take responsibility for “looking after” and protecting the feelings of the oh so vulnerable adult against a bad conscience. And to remain silent about their own experience. Or to put it another way, there is a role reversal of responsibilty between the adult and the child.
Guilt is the card that out trumps any other. There is no greater social sin than to raise issues that makes someone, somewhere feel guilty. And the moral focus then shifts to the question of the words that create guilt, rather than the actions, which created the guilt in the first place. It also changes the spotlight from the social problem to the person who raises the issue- shooting the messenger.
For years — first on Usenet, now even more easily with e-mail list services like YahooGroups, we’ve seen the proliferation of Internet support groups and communities. People united by nothing more than a common interest and a common language can meet, discuss, learn from each other, lean on each other, no matter how far apart they live. We get to know each other in an abbreviated fashion: we know the writing style, we know what subjects amuse and infuriate them, we understand the sense of humor. All this never hearing a voice or seeing a face or meeting in person.
Once, after my mother died, a woman I’d "known" from email for seven or eight years looked me up and called me on the phone. It was unexpected and such a strange sensation — the voice wasn’t right somehow. I’d "heard" her in my mind for so long. Her voice is pixels, a sig file and a wink 😉 at exactly the spot where I know it will go.
Our language hasn’t caught up with these relationships. Are these people friends? "Online friends?" Did we "hear" a rumor or read it? "I was saying just yesterday…" or typing? How long have we "known" them?
What happens to our sense of community and of empathy when we have close emotional ties, or think we do, to people we have never seen, touched, or heard — people we likely never will? It’s surely a challenge that our social natures have never really known.
This past week, a woman I have known through an internet email list for at least five years suffered a terrible personal tragedy — a childbirth went horribly wrong. Her baby died and she herself was near death; perhaps she will never bear another child. As the details came out, passed from computer to computer along a long chain that somewhere included a telephone and a human voice, I felt such a strong longing to do something.
Deep within all of us there is an urge to comfort the grieving. Grief cannot really be comforted with words, in my experience, although everyone wants to say something. So our primal instincts are to touch, to give, to be present. We do things like bring casseroles because we know it is so hard to remember to eat when the world seems to have stopped. We go to funerals and memorial services because we know that presence is something that comforts mourners. We reach out and touch hands. We come and mow the lawn. I remember my father-in-law washing the car for me before my mother’s funeral, so that it would look nice in the procession, and also he shined our black shoes. These physical things might not even be noticed in the midst of grief, but they will help, in real ways. And they are what we crave to give.
But if we are not friends "IRL," as they say (and isn’t it telling that Internet-only must mean… not your Real Life?), especially if some anonymity separates us (understandably), all we can offer is words, and words are pretty empty and sad little things in the yawning maw of grief.
People manage, anyway. A knot of supporters from one of the lists has started a Paypal fund to buy her a laptop she can use during her convalescence. Some of them are planning to drive or fly hundreds of miles to be with her at the funeral — they have decided to tear down the odd wall of Internet-only communities, entering into her real life.
I won’t be doing that, for a variety of reasons… but it does leave me with this strange sadness that has nowhere to go but here.
Today at Mass during the Offertory (inexplicably; this is Advent) we sang Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny child, a.k.a. "The Coventry Carol" after its tune.
You don’t hear that one very often outside of church, and not really very much in church, as lovely as the tune is. (Here’s a link to the tune at Oremus.org — link plays music.) I sing it only with great difficulty, myself. How strange and haunting: the lullaby of the grieving mothers of Bethlehem, on the day that Herod slaughtered the Holy Innocents: the carol that accompanies the Flight into Egypt, and is its dark other side.
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do, for to preserve this day / this poor youngling for whom we sing? Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Herod the king, in his raging, charged he hath this day / his men of might in his own sight, all young children to slay.
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Then woe is me, poor child, for thee! And every morn and day / for thy parting nor say nor sing ‘Bye, bye, lully, lullay.’
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.
I remember hearing the carol as a child and not really absorbing anything other than the refrain. I always thought it was a lullaby for the Baby Jesus: what other "thou little tiny child" is there to sing about at Christmastime? I didn’t know about them, and they have disappeared these days from our Christmas story, but… some fifteenth-century English tune-smith did remember the mothers of the forgotten little ones of Bethlehem, and we should be thankful for him.
The Christmas story is indeed a joyful one, but in the midst of it there is a great terror and sadness. December 28th is the Feast of the Holy Innocents: remember it, and sing Lully, lullay.
(Matthew 2:13-18: Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you: for Herod is about to search for the Child, to destroy Him." And he rose and took the Child and His mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt have I called My Son."Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation: Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they were no more.")
UPDATE: It’s possible that the Coventry Carol was chosen because this upcoming weekend, in honor of Our Lady of Guadelupe’s feast Monday, our parish is hosting a special pro-life Mass.
I mentioned in my last post that I’d been praying the Liturgy of the Hours for a while. Anyone else interested in starting? Here’s some background and how I did it.
The LOH is the daily prayer of the Church. Lots of people, including almost all priests and religious, pray some or all of the hours every day. Ever heard of "Matins," "Lauds," and "Vespers?" These are some of the Hours, or "Offices." (Think of Frere Jacques: Sonnez les matines is a command to ring the bells for the Matins prayer.) There’s a table here explaining which is which and giving a little background.
Morning Prayer takes me maybe fifteen minutes, including the Invitatory (which is always prayed before the first office of the day). Here’s the basic outline. All is to be read or sung aloud:
The whole thing is entirely prescribed in the breviary, although you are free to add your own petitions. This is especially nice in times of spiritual dryness, because the universal prayers of the Church spilling forth from our parched lips still are spoken, are given power by our assent, are still heard and still unite us to the divine will.
Back in engineering school, we were allowed to use our textbooks during examinations. The sweaty silence of midterms was set to a backdrop of constant, nearly-frantic rustling of pages: page by page back to find the appropriate equation, turn a sheaf of pages forward to the appendix of steam tables to search for enthalpy of water at such-and-such a temperature, then back to the inside front cover where we’d penciled in a list of useful constants… By the final exam our textbooks were hairy with Post-It tape flags and handmade index tabs to put the information we needed at our fingertips.
A peculiar nostalgia for those years sometimes returns to me when I pick up my breviary. On feast days and solemnities, and outside Ordinary Time, certain of the prayers and readings are replaced with special ones from particular sections of the breviary. One finds oneself looking up today’s date to see if it’s a feast day, finding that day’s saint in the back of the breviary, paging back to the psalms of Sunday, Week I but keeping a thumb in the Proper of Seasons in order to read the proper antiphons, going to the section called "Ordinary" to read first Psalm 95 and then later the Canticle. Fortunately, the thing comes with attached ribbon bookmarks. (Also, my breviary is stuck all over with Post-It repositionable index tabs, and I’ve penciled a few reminders in the inside front cover.)
OK, so how to get started? First, buy a breviary. You have three basic choices: Big (four volumes), Medium (one volume), and Short (travel-size, abridged). I recommend the one-volume (medium) breviary for beginners. The one I use is this one (I think — mine looks a little different, but it’s the same publisher.)
You might be able to figure it all out with the breviary alone, in combination with Internet resources or maybe with help from someone else who also prays the Hours. But there is another resource, one that really helped me despite my initial misgivings.
Let me say this clearly: The Divine Office for Dodos is in bad need of a good editor. But let me say it gently, too, because I am in great debt to Madeline Pecora Nugent, its author. It is the only guide to the Divine Office that I have found. She gives you everything you need, in very tiny little baby steps, to understand how the whole thing works and get into the rhythm of the Hours. I really wish that someone at, say, Ignatius Press or TAN Books (or the …For Dummies people) would pick up this book, mark it all up, repackage it and reissue it, because it could be a very, very good guide if it were properly edited.
My point: Don’t let Nugent’s writing style keep you from extracting the useful information and tips out of her book. Take a look at the Amazon reviews: everyone criticized her style and humor but she still got five stars. (Oh, and don’t bother sending the clip-out coupon away for the Bouncing Bookmarks and Restful Ribbons. Instead, invest in some of these.)
Even though Morning and Evening Prayer are supposedly the crucial Offices for someone who can only pray a couple of them, the next one I’d like to try to add to my life is the Office of Readings. This one includes, along with the psalms, two lengthy readings, one from Scripture, one taken from the writings of Church fathers or theologians or saints. My one-volume breviary only has an abridged Office of Readings, just a couple of dozen different ones. If I manage to incorporate the Office of Readings into my regular life, to the point where I have to start repeating myself, I’m going to reward myself. I’m thinking: a brand-new four-volume breviary with a different reading for each day of the year.
A while back I blogged about A Mother’s Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot. It’s on my mind today because I finally got it back from a friend who had borrowed it, and I mean to reread it. In short, it’s a guide to help you get your priorities in order: God, health, marriage, children, work. It’s probably the most effective get-your-life-and-home-in-order tool I’ve ever tried, especially in combination with the routines developed by the Flylady.
I’ve been neglecting my Rule for a while. But one aspect of it has stuck, to my great astonishment. When I developed my Rule I decided that I would make time to pray some of the Hours. And despite all the other laxities that have crept into my life, I’ve managed to keep up Morning Prayer, almost every day.
This is not, I swear, because of a great deal of dedication on my part. I’ve almost been forced to do it. I have actually noticed that I have a better day if I pray the Morning Hour before I do anything else. (Well, almost. The first thing I do is get myself a cup of coffee.)
Nor do I mean that I am more spiritually content or have a purer heart or any sort of thing. I mean this purely empirically. Pray Morning Prayer: get stuff done, get through homeschooling, read stories to children, house is cleaner, dinner is done on time, general feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day. Don’t pray Morning Prayer: dawdle around on the Internet far too much, neglect my stuff, yell more at the kids, get homeschooling half done before giving up, resort to plopping kids in front of The Incredibles, dinner gets started late if at all, end day feeling resentful and generally unsatisfied.
Why? Why? I could spout pious maxims about the importance of putting prayer first, but my scientist brain casts about for another reason. Is it the comfort and transition of a waking-up ritual? Is it the sort of mental state, semi-thoughtful, that it puts me in? Is it just because it prolongs the morning coffee as I have to sip between stanzas and antiphons?
The effect seems to be independent of my state of prayerfulness. Sometimes I really enter into the prescribed prayers and psalms; they strike chords in my heart and seem to be speaking right to me, or they seem to express my own soul’s true lament or praise or petition better than I could have myself. Other times my lips move and I say the words as if out of mere obedience, I seem to have said the same thing fruitlessly before many times, and my mind wanders constantly to the concerns of my upcoming day and my long to-do list. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. Even just going through the motions improves my day.
Lots of times I pick up the breviary with contentment and look forward to the few minutes of prayer. Some days I don’t have that contentment or that anticipation. But I pick the thing up anyway because I will be sorry if I won’t. It’s like, oh, making breakfast for myself or something. I don’t always feel like cooking, but goshdarnit, I have to eat.
Astonishing, I tell you.
UPDATE: Interested in learning to pray with the Liturgy of the Hours, a.k.a. the Divine Office? Click here to go to the next post, for some background and tips for getting started, that is, how I did it.
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