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].

“Could you not keep watch for one hour?”

Today at Mass, our priest and a few parishioners put out a call for volunteers. We have a few empty spots in the weekly Eucharistic Adoration schedule.

We’re going to do it: Mark and I decided to commit to one hour a week between us. We asked to be given either 5 a.m., 6 a.m., or 7 a.m. on a week day. The kids are sleeping then. We figure that we can take turns, and that on Mark’s turn he can just leave from there to go to work, while on my turn I can make it back in time for him to leave from work.

When we needed to find a new parish, I started with a list of local parishes that keep perpetual-adoration chapels (do it yourself here). We planned to work down the list in order of distance from our house, but we fell in love with the nearest one, and that’s where we joined. I had hoped that the Eucharist exposed twenty-four hours a day would be the sign to us of a parish with great love and reverence for the Lord’s body and blood. And so it is.

You can read here about the history of this practice. Basically, our parish keeps a tiny chapel unlocked 24 hours a day, with access to a bathroom but not to the rest of the church. (The chapel can be locked from the inside.) Inside the chapel are about a dozen chairs and a couple of kneelers.

At the front hangs a crucifix on the wall and below it on a marble table is a monstrance, also called an ostensorium. This is a stand specially made to display the Blessed Sacrament. A host consecrated at the most recent Mass is placed in the center opening.

This Host is the source of our spiritual life, as the sun is the source of our biological life, so "the most appropriate form [of the monstrance] is that of the sun emitting its rays to all sides."

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In order to maintain a perpetual adoration chapel, volunteers must be present at all times. We cannot leave the Lord’s Body and Blood unsupervised; it may seem strange, but there are indeed people who would harm this small white Host. So we require around three hundred volunteers: most to commit to stay with Him a weekly hour, some to serve as substitutes. Most of the slots are filled, but the middle of the night can be hard to fill up. I suppose that some of the adorers are doing double and triple duty to keep the chapel open until more folks volunteer.

What do you do in front of the Sacrament? Some meditate, some pray, some read Scripture, some just sit in God’s presence. I try, whenever I am driving in the neighborhood, to stop in, even for a few minutes.

I bring my children in every once in a while. I usher them into this tiny room where one or two people sit or kneel quietly. They know to kneel down when we first go in. Oscar, age five, knows that this is a special chapel and an especially good place to pray. He stands on one of the kneelers and whispers intently, his brow furrowed. When he is done, after just a few minutes, we get up and quietly, quietly, slip out.

I don’t dare stay longer; I want to take them out before they have had enough. I want them to remember only the Eucharist in its golden throne, reverence and silence, and being trusted and allowed as children to enter this important-feeling, grown-up feeling, special place. Neither has ever misbehaved in the chapel.

My times in the chapel are always so short. I am looking forward to having a whole hour to spend before Him, twice a month. I am thrilled that my husband will be doing the same.

Oct 23, 2005

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And the cashier washes her hands between each piece of fruit.

Today we stopped at a franchise of a national chain of certified-organic grocery stores to pick up bananas and nuts.

Click to enlarge and read the sign on the conveyor belt.

I’m sure the cashier is overjoyed whenever anyone asks. The people waiting in line, too.

Oct 23, 2005

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Milo is two.

Milo turned two on Friday. We went to the Como Zoo. Here he is watching the polar bear:

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Milo loves birds, so I made him a bird cake. No sculpture for me; I work mainly in buttercream.

I made a standard yellow layer cake recipe, with plenty of egg yolks and no egg white. Halving the recipe yielded enough batter for a single eight-inch-square layer. (My family of four doesn’t need a bigger one.)

For the first time, I tried using 100% whole wheat pastry flour. We liked it! It had a firmer, more substantial crumb than a white-flour cake, and a nuttier flavor, almost like corn bread. It took the chocolate buttercream icing beautifully. I reserved some icing before adding the chocolate and piped it onto the cake in the shape of a bird (species uncertain, but it looks gooseish to me). Then I added yellow food coloring to the bag and gave it a beak and feet.

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Milo liked the cake.

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Oct 23, 2005

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Causing problems for yourself.

DarwinCatholic responds to my post on complaining about your children. Maybe you can complain your way into problems:

As the drama prof pounded into my head when I took acting back in college, the best way to get yourself to feel an emotion is to take on the external characteristics of that feeling…

Watching the people at work who constantly complain about their spouses, or some of the couple we know who complain about their kids, I can’t help wondering if complaining about something in order to have something in common to commiserate about can often as not create resentment where it didn’t before exist.

It’s plausible.

Oct 23, 2005

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Optical illusion.

This is cool. H/t The Volokh Conspiracy.

Oct 22, 2005

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Blogging bearings.
When I first started blogging, soon after I went home, I named my blog Re-engineering and planned it to chronicle my transition: from the career I’d planned in academia, to the part-time work-from home one I would be cobbling together. For fun I would comment on science and tech in the news. I congratulated myself for giving my blog such a clever name.

After a little while I found that I didn’t actually want to write anything in Re-engineering, at all. I went days without posting. I told myself that I was too busy. Eventually I had to admit that Re-engineering was boring.

But I had already paid for many more months of Typepad. So I deleted everything I’d written and renamed my blog, and now I look forward to posting. I wake up in the middle of the night and make mental notes about something or other I should blog about (of course, I never remember them in the morning).

What’s the difference? I didn’t stop writing about engineering. One thing I like about Bearing Blog is that I still write about technology — it’s part of my makeup by this time — but under the new name I have permission to let it be a part of me, not the focus of my entire life. And I do enjoy writing about engineering, mathematics and the like, much more than I enjoyed it when I tried to make it my whole blog. You’ll see it represented up there in the masthead (scroll up), as definition number three. This was, in fact, the definition of bearing that inspired the name. I originally wanted to make the title a pun on the term "journal bearing." But I didn’t think most people would get it.

The other definitions of bearing have turned out to occupy much more of my attention:
bear – ing n.

the manner in which one comports oneself;

the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit;

a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~ ];

pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;

the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
I no longer think myself clever for having come up with a good blog name. Instead I am grateful that my first idea, a bit too obscure for most, led me so unexpectedly to a collection of concepts that I can mine endlessly for material that’s fun to write.

And the funny thing is, these days, bearing seems as good an organizational concept for my life’s work as any.
- I have a character of my own, a bearing, to develop and improve.
- I am a mother, laboring to bring forth my offspring (and a laborer more generally, hoping my works are fruitful).
- I want to get my bearings, that is, both knowledge and correct perspective. Also I’d like to give it to everyone else.
- I am a Christian: I participate in the bearing of the cross.
- And because you can take the engineer out of engineering, but you can’t take the engineering out of the engineer, I can’t resist the machine-part analogy:
I am a part of the Machine, of the System of the World.* But where some might say we are all cogs, I say that at least some of us are bearings, supporting weight, cushioning blows, transmitting forces, smoothing the paths of all traveling parts, turning and turning each in our own races, all of us levitating on and enveloped by and anointed in a sheen too fine to see. That grease comes in from the outside, injected by some invisible technician or watchmaker; but in the end it’s the small bearings that transmit the supply from part to part. More than any other part, we need it to do our job, and our job is to pass it on to whatever parts are nearest.

The title of a blog does turn out to be significant, and not just because it’s the name of the link that readers might or might not click on. Giving it a lot of thought, making it the perfect name for what I wanted to do, didn’t work for me. Instead, I let my name-impulse guide what the blog was to become. Something to think about, all you newbies.

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*With apologies to Isaac Newton and Neal Stephenson.
Oct 22, 2005

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I give you permission to tell me how much you enjoy your kids.

Amy Welborn linked to this wonderful opinion piece in the Guardian, by a mother with four children under two (she had triplets) who is — gasp! — enjoying her children:

No one wants to hear that we are having a lovely time with our babies, who have started to smile all at once this week, and are sleeping in blissful four-hour chunks all of a sudden, and are so bright-eyed and lively after their bath that we feel like cracking open a bottle of champagne just to give them the party they seem to be up for. It’s not what people want. They want to hear how dreadful we feel, how exhausted and depressed we are, how it’s the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, ever.

She hits it right on the head — already I hear this kind of remark from people when they see me out with my five-year-old and two-year-old boys. Two children — two! — and daily it seems I hear "Wow, you’ve got your hands full" from cashiers and the like.

I don’t understand what it is that makes people constantly denigrate their own young children, sometimes in earshot, sometimes not (he really keeps me on my toes *eye roll*) (she has been driving me crazy with that thing today) (more kids? oh gosh no I can barely handle *these two* as it is) (oh my god I can’t wait until school starts). I know people must love their kids, but it’s as if it is unseemly to admit it.

And if you’re allowed to admit delight in your children, you aren’t allowed to delight in the experience of parenthood of young children. New mothers are allowed some oohing and aahing, but still we expect, after a couple of weeks, that the story is we’re coping, we’ll survive, not — this is amazing, I can’t believe we waited so long, every day she takes my breath away, I could just hold him and hold him all day long.

Is this — "isn’t parenthood a drag" — just acceptable small talk, like complaining about the weather? (Then maybe that explains it, because I never could get the hang of small talk.) Or is it true that most people really don’t like it? If so, why is their experience so different from mine?

Because I love my kids. I love throwing myself into the mothering life, every morning. I can’t even call it "work!" It’s too much fun. Yes, I have rough days from time to time. But I’m the grownup — it’s not like it’s their fault if I spend a whole morning stomping about grumpy. (Maybe when they’re older.) Most of my days, I have a wonderful time.

I’m happy! I loved being pregnant, giving birth (yes) and having tiny babies who nursed all night and all day. I want more kids. That makes so much sense to me on a gut level that, e.g., when I heard a young pregnant mother say to another last week in the kids’ music class, This is the last, we’re done after this one: my first impulse was to feel terribly sad for her, to say with all the sympathy I can muster Oh, I’m so very sorry, because my first thought was that some tragedy must have befallen her family, like horrible postpartum depression or complete financial ruin, that forced her to renounce childbearing.

This happens a lot. Usually I come to my senses in time, and remember, Oh yes, more than one or two children just isn’t ‘done’ anymore. But I still cannot imagine that. What a poverty to feel that one must say, No, to babies. Maybe it’s better, maybe worse, to actually not want them.

I wonder about all the couples who long to conceive and bear children and literally can’t. What is it like for them to hear friends complaining about the babies they have, and paying good money to have their sleek, smooth, glisteningly healthy tubes sliced and cauterized, their abundant seed diverted and thrown away?

But most days I feed the children breakfast, I do some shopping, I teach Oscar to read, I take them for a walk, I listen and watch and smile. Milo turned two yesterday, and I gave him a little box of plastic figurines of birds. He lined them up on the table, put them back into the box, carried them around, lined them up on the table again. Bird bird, he said over and over. This morning I left him with Mark so I could take the computer to the coffee shop, and when he said to me I go, I said, You and Daddy can play with your birds. As I quietly opened the door and headed down the stairs I heard him: Bird bird Daddy. Bird bird.

I like my Saturday mornings, breakfast out alone with a book, the coffee shop with my computer, my little weekly retreat. But every week I almost can’t wait to get back.

Oct 22, 2005

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The wages of sin is tilth.

Dinner has been served. Grace has been said.

Mark, spooning up helpings of fish and potatoes: “Quite often, when I sit down to dinner, I am thankful that we can afford to pay people to provide us with a variety of good food. People worked in dangerous conditions for many hours to bring us this fish. People toiled in the hot sun so that we could have these potatoes.”

Oscar: “We know who brought us the peppers. Grandpa did.”

Me: “Yes! Grandpa toiled to grow the peppers for us.”

Mark: “No, that doesn’t count. You don’t toil when it’s a hobby farm.”

Me: “Good point. Grandpa probably enjoys growing the peppers.”

Mark: “Unless he secretly hates growing peppers. And the hobby farm is actually some kind of harsh, self-imposed penance.”

Me, considering the twenty-three acres: “Hmmm. That would explain a lot.”

Mark: “The problem is that it then raises a few more questions, wouldn’t you think?”

Oct 21, 2005

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Mmmmm *smack smack*. Needs just a little bit more.

Tell me this:

Why, in a meatloaf recipe, right after the instruction to thoroughly mix herbs, spices, rolled oats, and egg with several pounds of raw, bloody ground beef, is the next instruction “Salt to taste?”

Oct 21, 2005

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DarwinCatholic.

They linked to me, so I’m linking back under Quid Pro Quo on the right.

There’s some good stuff up on the front page right now. I particularly liked this moving post. Here’s another good one.

Oct 20, 2005

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A point I hadn’t thought of: Fatherhood, Creatorhood, God.

A good reflection over at Pontifications begins with this observation:

The truth of the matter, then, is that while God was always Father, he was not always Creator or Maker.

Short, but it’s a neat point, isn’t it?

The writer includes the caution against reading too much time-sense into "while" and "was always" and "was not always" — because, of course, one of the things Created or Made was time itself.

Instead, read it this way: Creatorhood is not an essential, inherent, or defining characteristic of God. God might have chosen not to create, only to be. But Fatherhood is indeed an essential, inherent, defining characteristic of God. God has always possessed Fatherhood and Sonship and… something… that proceeds from the union of Fatherhood and Sonship. Can we call it Love?

Whatever Fatherhood means within the Godhead, we give it that name because we were told to (cf. the Gospel of John); and what fatherhood means to us on Earth, it must mean because God created it in order to give God’s Fatherhood the same name, to tell us something about it.

First Fatherhood; then creation; then fatherhood. Some people fear that the current attack on fatherhood — the devaluing of men and the celebration of boys, the fatherless children, and the like — is a recent and depressingly successful diabolical attack, meant ultimately to destroy our concept of God as Father.

But how successful can these "recent" attacks be? Earthly fatherhood, we are told, has never been what God ordained it to be. There never was on earth a father or a son until after the fall, when Adam knew Eve his wife and she brought forth Cain. We have never seen a father of the kind God intended. And yet, by the time 30 A.D. rolled around, after millennia of further decay, God expected us to see and know enough about what fatherhood should be, enough that He still employed that impossibly archaic prelapsarian metaphor.

Can fatherhood today be farther from fatherhood in 30 A.D., than 30 A.D. was from before the Fall? I don’t think so. The glass is smeared heavily, but it could not have been crystal clear two thousand years ago. This is not to say that we shouldn’t bother keeping it as clear as we can, maybe even rubbing off some of the grime. The point is, fatherhood was a serviceable metaphor then, and it is serviceable now. And it can only be so if God expects us to understand, enough, what fatherhood means to Him. He expects us to comprehend the ideal even though all our examples are woefully imperfect. Yes, they are bad now, but they always have been very, very bad, compared to the father God made Adam to be.

An important point: Although the world has seen no father of the kind God intended, it has seen one son. We have a perfect example of Sonship, if we can only sift from Him the features that are essential, inherent, defining (begottenness, obedience) from the incidental (Middle-easternness, celibacy). It isn’t as easy as you would think (male? firstborn?)

Oct 20, 2005

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Understanding the other side: SSM.

Maggie Gallagher has been guest-blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy all week, patiently explaining the legal, economic, and social case against ratifiying same-sex unions as "marriages." The first post is here, October 17th at 10:34 a.m., or (for a while anyway) you can just go to the main page and scroll around.

This is Maggie’s goal for the week:

I’ve learned from much experience that when two intelligent people cannot even understand how the other person’s can possibly believe their own argument—that’s when something really interesting is going on.

I have no illusions I’m going to spend this week persuading people to change their minds on gay marriage. So I’d like to try to do something else big and important: to “achieve disagreement”. To figure out for myself, and maybe for you too, what has changed that makes the original, cross-cultural, historic understanding of marriage literally unintelligible to so many of this country’s best and brightest. In the process, maybe some advocates of gay marriage will understand why, quite apart from any disagreement about sexual orientation, so many Americans are deeply disturbed by the idea of gay marriage.

She’s trying to get opponents to understand her position.

I read somewhere (sorry to haul out that canard) that classically, a student of debate and rhetoric first had to learn to accurately summarize the position of the other side. Unless he could state the opponent’s position clearly, to the satisfaction of the debating opponent himself, the debater was not considered fit to make his own arguments.

It makes sense on two levels. First, why should you score points for arguing against a position you clearly cannot understand? Second, why should an intelligent and worthy opponent want to debate you if you cannot respect him enough to enunciate his position with your own voice?

The comments are quite hostile, but I have great hope that many regular VC readers will come away with a renewed appreciation for the arguments from "the other side."

Next week, Dale Carpenter, a proponent of same-sex marriage (and a lawprof from my own University of Minnesota), will be guest-blogging. I am looking forward to reading his arguments and hoping that through them I will be better able to understand and argue against the most cogent positions promoting SSM.

UPDATE: I asked one of her detractors, and by no means the least articulate, in the comments to try to summarize Maggie’s position accurately. He summed it as follows:

So, in her view:

1. Marriage is not marriage if two people marry who either know they are not interfertile….or have no intention of engendering babies together.

2. Use of AID, or adoption, doesn’t count. It’s still not marriage if the couple intend to adopt or plan to have children via artificial insemination.

See what I mean? He actually cannot do it. How on earth can two people argue if they mischaracterize each other so poorly?

Oct 20, 2005

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